We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (4 page)

‘Do you?’ said Kellas.

‘You said you’d always had an ambition to sleep with a right-wing woman,’ said M’Gurgan. ‘You felt they’d be less encumbered by guilt than the left-wing ones. They’d assume they were entitled to pleasure. You hoped they might share some of their selfishness with you.’

‘I don’t remember saying any of that,’ said Kellas. A smile worked at the edge of his mouth.

‘Did she not meet up with your hopes?’ said Sophie. She was looking hard at Kellas, with curiosity, her very dark brown eyes intent under her cropped chestnut hair. The three of them had attended the same school in Duncairn, although M’Gurgan’s timetable had been such that he did not meet her until years later.

‘Liam Cunnery knows her,’ said Kellas. He realised he was blushing and looking down at his hands as he fidgeted with the pepper mill. He looked from M’Gurgan to Sophie and back, grinned and looked down at his hands again. ‘He gave her a job as a TV researcher once. He does a nice job of separating the person from their ideas. He can pick out Melissa’s ideologies and get on with Melissa, like a vegetarian picking out the scraps of bacon from a salad and leaving them on the side of his plate. But she is a snob, and she does think rich folks’ kids are born brighter. And the last thing she said when she was leaving was: “You know, Adam, if your cock could have been just half an inch bigger.” She held her fingers up, like that. The precision of it, like some kind of scien
tific instrument. I think she might have closed one eye when she did it.’

Their laughing was in the downswing a short time later and M’Gurgan went to fetch another bottle. Upstairs, they heard one of the girls scream, a door slam, and Fergus singing the chorus from
Hotel Yorba
. When he got to ‘I’ll be glad to see ya later’, there was a series of thuds and a moan.

‘I’ll go,’ said Sophie. She went upstairs making anxious threats.

‘Your boy’s drunk,’ said Kellas.

‘We got drunk when we were boys.’

‘We’re drunk now.’

‘Come on,’ said M’Gurgan. ‘Walk.’

Fergus’s head injury wasn’t serious. Kellas and M’Gurgan walked through the streets of Dumfries. It was Tuesday night and the pubs had long since closed. Cars rounded corners in ones and twos, somehow hunched in the darkness and furtive. A stout old man tautly zipped into a synthetic fleece walked slowly behind a panting black Labrador. His belly swung slightly as he walked, like a side of pork nudged in the chill room. A drunken girl yelped and swore a few streets away. Passing a darkened pub, they thought they heard the clack of two pool balls inside and M’Gurgan hammered on the door, suspecting a lock-in. No one came. They arrived at the square. The clocktower said midnight. They leaned against the plinth under the Robert Burns statue and M’Gurgan passed Kellas a plastic bottle of Grouse.

‘He was our age when he died,’ said Kellas, nodding up at the poet.

M’Gurgan said: ‘His wife had their last kid on the day they buried him.’ He was slurring his words a little. ‘He was such a fecund bugger and I think half the boys round here have his genes. You’d think condoms had never been invented. I hate to be the untrusting father but when you see the carry on like tonight with Angela and Carrie, you think are they just winding me up with the not-drinking or is one of them pregnant? Children are like
books. Once you’ve finished making them, they’re not yours any more.’

Kellas knew the time was coming when he would have to tell M’Gurgan what he was writing. He asked M’Gurgan if he’d finished the first book of his fantasy trilogy.

‘I changed my mind,’ said M’Gurgan.

Kellas’s arms pimpled and he shivered. ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

‘I changed my mind.’ He shrugged and screwed the cap back on the bottle. ‘I gave the money back. I’m not doing it.’ He looked at Kellas, widened his eyes and made a single high-pitched note of laughter. ‘I haven’t told Sophie. She might leave me. She’s been planning a holiday in Egypt for us.’

‘She won’t leave you.’

‘Yeah. Maybe. Ah, I couldn’t do it. It was ridiculous. I was sitting there one night and I realised I’d spent two days coming up with names for elves. I was saying to myself should it be Balinur, or should it be Balemar? Or Balagun? And I realised I’d turned into this raving fool. I wanted to sell out so we could live better but I couldn’t look at Fergus in a Versace suit if I knew it’d been bought by a man sitting in an attic inventing names for non-existent creatures with pointy ears. Maybe there’s another way. I’m back onto
The Book of Form
now.’

Kellas made approving sounds. He knew
The Book of Form
. M’Gurgan was a poet and it was a poet’s novel. He’d been working on it for fifteen years. It was dazzling, lovely, like exquisitely tooled, streamlined, burnished parts of a flying machine that hadn’t been put together because they’d never been designed to be, couldn’t fit, and would never fly.

M’Gurgan asked Kellas what he was writing. Kellas began to answer him slowly by referring to a novel. While he spoke, his mind was scouring the void for a way to justify to a socialist Scottish poet he had known since childhood – who, despite having learned
To Brooklyn Bridge
by heart at the age of nineteen and
being able to pick out a good part of the American folk song catalogue on his twelve-stringed guitar, would refer to Americans as ‘fucking Yanks’ – the writing of a commercial thriller designed from the first page to appeal to audiences in multiplex cinemas in the mid-western states of the US and to young male aficionados of shoot-’em-up computer games. He could only think about Robert Burns, and how M’Gurgan the father was vexed by the promiscuity of Burns’ young descendants, and how M’Gurgan the remnant boy, as a known Dumfries poet, was not certain to be loyal to Sophie, and how time forgave poets any degree of infidelity, not only to their wives but to their ideals, so long as they were passionately, lyrically sung at the moment they were sung. Burns the Scottish patriot and the British patriot, Burns the monarchist-revolutionary. Burns who sang in joy at the French Revolution, and sang in joy at the American Revolution. What song would he have written if the French had tried to make the American Revolution for the Americans before the Americans were ready? A gust of air blew through Kellas’s brain, clearing the fat spirals of wine and whisky twirling there. Kellas began to explain his new book to M’Gurgan as if he’d always intended it to be this way, but it came to him then and there, as he spoke it. He explained to the poet how he intended to write a best-selling novel pitched at the militaristic market. It would subvert the genre by making America the enemy – not a group within America, but the American government, the American majority and the American way. American characters would be portrayed as clichéd, humourless, two-dimensional, degenerate, ignorant caricatures, while their European counterparts, the heroes and heroines, would be wisecracking, genuine, loving, courageous, salt-of-the-earth types. The book would play on the reservoir of anti-Americanism and European patriotism that went so deep and was so seldom tapped. Readers would be made to believe in a limited war to save civilization, with a motley group of British, French, German and perhaps even Spanish, Italian and Russian warriors defeating a perfidious American plot to thwart
international justice. Europeans would love it. It would be denounced in pulpits and on talk radio in the States, and Americans would hate it and would buy it in enormous quantities to find out what was so worth denouncing. Kellas hadn’t plotted the whole thing out, he said, but it would surely include a scene in which the Europeans would storm a US airfield in East Anglia using a collection of iconic old vehicles.

‘I think there’ll be an Austin Allegro,’ said Kellas. ‘A British woman pilot at the wheel and a veteran of the Foreign Legion shooting down an American bomber with a missile poked out of the sun roof.’

M’Gurgan didn’t say anything while Kellas was talking, and didn’t look at him, just stood there with his back against the plinth, frowning and blinking, head slightly bowed. After Kellas had finished there was silence for a time. A police car slowed down opposite them, then speeded up and disappeared.

‘What’s it called?’ said M’Gurgan.

‘I haven’t got a title.’

‘How about
The Antichrist Strikes Back
?’

Kellas smiled. M’Gurgan asked if it was satire. Kellas was about to say yes and hesitated because it would not be the truth. He shook his head. The book would only work if it appeared sincerely shallow. If he was going to do it, lying to the readers wouldn’t be necessary; all that mattered would be lying to himself and believing himself when he made the world a simpler, sillier place than he thought it was. Although he hadn’t spent much time with prostitutes, and had until now avoided becoming one himself, he understood what made some more popular than others. It was the opposite of satire. They entranced themselves into an appearance of sincerity so perfect that it was indistinguishable from sincerity.

‘You know I meant it when I said I liked your last one,’ said M’Gurgan. ‘I loved
The Maintenance of Fury
. I think you were onto something there.’

‘I never saw it in a bookshop.’

‘You look miserable. Do you think I’m going to give you a hard time over this?’

‘Maybe I’ll change my mind, like you.’

‘I don’t think so. But you’ll never sell a book like that now. Everybody reckons America’s the wounded puppy after the Twin Towers went down.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t think so?’

‘You’re closer to soldiers than I am to elves. You’re going to Afghanistan next week. I’m not going to the enchanted forest to make magic with some bunch of goblins.’ M’Gurgan flung out his hand in irritation, as if he was shooing a wasp out of a room. ‘Everybody compromises. It’s hard to be pure.’

Kellas took the train back to London the next day. He’d already obtained his Russian visa. He’d flown to Moscow, got a visa for Tajikistan, bribed his way to a ticket on Tajikistan Airlines, flown to Dushanbe, acquired an Afghan visa and flown in the lizard-coloured plane to Faizabad. M’Gurgan had been wrong. By the time Kellas returned from Afghanistan, the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay had opened and Kellas and others like him had begun sending off for maps of Iraq. In London, Frankfurt and Paris they heard the rising note of puppy snarl. His book had not been hard to sell.

The Heathrow train was in the tunnel beneath the airport, slowing down. Kellas stretched and folded his arms. A stickiness in there. He would have to buy a fresh bandage before getting on the plane. He watched the business people line up their briefcases on wheels in the aisle.

There was one message he would reply to. His thumb worked the keypad, telling his agent to fax the final contract for the book to his publishers’ office in New York. He’d sign it there. He stepped out of the train into the contrived shadows of the station’s south aisle. He was the only one not hurrying. Suits and briefcases on wheels flowed around him. He read M’Gurgan’s single contribution
to the morning’s flow of text messages. It said: ‘Adam. More blood and darkness than you or we deserve. Call me.’

He switched off the phone and walked towards the escalators.

K
ellas bought a first-class, one-way ticket to New York at one of the airline counters. He’d never flown first class. The saleswoman was friendly. Perhaps they were more friendly after you paid four thousand pounds for a first-class seat. It was a lot to pay for an extra square yard of space, free champagne and metal cutlery. He was going to spend like a lottery winner for a few days. He might turn out to be good at being rich. He’d been watching them. He noticed that they made luxury seem like something that had been imposed on them regardless of their wishes. It was impossible to tell whether they enjoyed champagne or not. It was what was provided, like water in the tap, and they bore it.

‘You’ve been in the wars,’ said the saleswoman when she handed him his documents. She had a Sinhalese name. She wore dark, heavy lipstick and had a constellation of tiny moles, like freckles, on her cheekbones. She was looking at his grubby bandage, which looped out from under his cuff over the base of his thumb and back inside the sleeve.

‘Yes, I have,’ said Kellas. He smiled. ‘It’s a war wound.’

The woman’s mouth turned down at the corners and her eyes became rounder. ‘From where?’ she asked.

‘From Camden last night,’ he said.

‘You should get it seen to before you board. Have a nice flight.’ She smiled widely and he thanked her and walked away. She’d been checking on him, that he might not behave in an inappropriate way, bleed like the underclass on the starched napery of a 747’s royal enclosure. He looked round and at the same moment she looked up
from her screen and caught his eye. This time she didn’t smile. She looked anxious. He should have stayed away from the war wound fuckwittedness, the being cute. The ticket clerk’s family was probably from Sri Lanka some generations back. Who knew what real war wounds flexed sinuous and pink here, crimped by healed-up thread holes, under nice jeans and skirts and T-shirts.

Once through check-in and security, Kellas went to Boots. He bought a pack of AA batteries and asked if they had bandages. It turned out that they did, a clinical range and variety, as if regiments of the wounded regularly stopped to change their dressings in transit through Heathrow. Four laden shelves barked the legacy of sawbones past, with layers of boast like the multidecker ads in old newspapers. Advanced First Aid – Stops Bleeding Fast – Dressings – For Larger Cuts And Grazes – Absorbs Blood – Hypoallergenic, said one box. Faster Healing – Skin Closure Kit – For Deeper Cuts. Kellas took two of these, and two stretch bandages (High Quality – Non-fray – Bandages To Hold Dressings Firmly In Place). He would use one of each, and the remainder would constitute his goods for the voyage to America. He didn’t want to enter the first-class saloon with frayed bandages. By the time he reached the washroom, a luxurious bead of fresh blood was stroking its way towards the saddle of his hand. Kellas yanked a wad of paper towels from the dispenser but still a drop fell onto the floor tiles before he could blot it up. A cleaner in a green polyester suit set down his bucket some distance away.

‘You can’t do that in here,’ he said, as if a place elsewhere in the airport had been set aside for that purpose, with its own pictogram. The bleeding man, black on yellow.

‘Sorry,’ said Kellas, ducking down and removing the spot with a dab and a smear. ‘I need a fresh bandage.’

He took off his jacket, laid it next to the washbasin, rolled up his bloodied sleeve and ran the bandaged arm under a stream of cold water. He’d made a mess of it, and he was going to make a mess of it again, because it was hard to dress a wound on your own
forearm. He took off the ragged cloth he’d bound the cut with, using teeth as a third hand, a few hours earlier. Now the cloth looked a hundred years old. Washed, the cut was long, not deep, a sticky channel where the clot had split down the middle and begun to bleed again. A doctor might counsel stitches, but he could get by without. It was still difficult to understand how he’d done it, although he had filled the Cunnerys’ with sharp, jagged edges in a short time. He’d been efficient enough in that way and only when all the women, Melissa, Lucy, Sophie, Margot and Tara, were screaming and yelling at once had he grown tired and careless. All the men, too; a seamless bellowing and barking, like cattle and wolves in the pen together, disturbed from their struggle with each other by a more terrible common enemy from the plain beyond. It was perhaps the sight of the blood that had stopped them laying hands on him for long enough for him to run out of the house.

He took the skin closure kit and bandage out of the Boots plastic bag, out of their boxes and out of their clear plastic wrapping and laid them on either side of the tap. The men coming and going from the washbasins on either side all glanced at his medical supplies. Nobody asked, and the question marks were hidden in the sound of flushing and banging cubicle doors and zips and hot air dryers. Kellas picked up the kit and prepared to use his teeth. He felt a hand on his shoulder and the cleaner took the kit from him. Without speaking, without looking at Kellas’s face until the end, the cleaner took charge of Kellas’s wound. He had warm, gentle hands, slightly rough, and treated Kellas with the fatherly, sceptical firmness of a cheap barber. He had grey curly hair and a grey moustache and North African features. He must have been in his fifties. A smell of cologne came from the warmth of his head and neck. Kellas was grateful for the help and more grateful still that the cleaner neither spoke nor expected him to speak. He had intended to ask his name, and where he was from, but when the cleaner finished his swift, neat work, stood back, grasped the haft of his mop and nodded at Kellas,
Kellas only said ‘Shukran’, one of the cluster of words he’d memorised since beginning to learn Arabic a few months earlier in anticipation of the invasion of Iraq.

The cleaner smiled. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said. ‘Have a nice flight.’

When he came back out into the lurid mall of departures Kellas felt an unpleasant tang at the back of his mouth and began to blink. The cleaner had been kind; kindness was not good for Kellas now. It would have been better if the cleaner had punched him in the face. Kindness was fine by itself, but shame was always tagging along behind it, wanting to join in. When you saw kindness, you knew shame was around the corner, with all its snivels, whimpers and regrets. Where are you flying to today, sir? New York? That’s lovely. And could I just ask, what are you flying from? Your enemies? That’s not what it says here, sir. Look, it says ‘Friends’.

What he needed was to see the aircraft, the broad, heavy, thick-winged, four-engined ones, quaking along the runway and floating free of the ground like mercy, like a miracle, towards the ocean. When he saw them move and take off, he would be all right. One of them would carry him away into the clouds and out to the blue west. He was not a fugitive, although others could think it. He had gone back before dawn and pushed a blank cheque through Cunnery’s letterbox, with ‘Whatever it takes’ written on the back, in capitals, for some reason. They could think that he was on the run from them but that was because they did not know he was running towards someone else. He had wanted to see her for a year and now she had asked to see him, and he was coming. Kellas started to walk towards the departure gate.

He passed a woman in low-cut jeans and a cropped green woollen cardigan which showed her belly and her shoulders. She had her hair in lacquered ringlets and scarlet lipstick over a deep tan and a gold stud in her belly-button and she went by on heels, hauling a carry-on bag behind her. She glanced at him and looked away. He would like to have been sure he wasn’t crossing the Atlantic for sex. People did this. Men and women flew tens of thousands of miles,
expending hundreds of pounds and thousands of litres of jet fuel, in order to have sex, and not only middle-aged, rich-world sex tourists in Bangkok or Zanzibar, but fit, attractive young men and women from London or Brisbane or Buenos Aires who’d got tangled up with somebody who lived on the other side of the world and who, even though they were not fond enough of each other for either to settle closer at hand, found it easier to cross the oceans every six months to touch their counterpart’s naked body than to find somebody new to share their bed in their own towns. It wasn’t that. Part of the idea of travelling so light was his hope that, when he arrived, the woman he’d travelled to see would need less weight to hold him there. He didn’t want to lose his nerve. Of course she was pretty, but an awful lot of people were, and they were no good to be around; they were only curators of their own beauty. They could show you it, but once the tour was over, there was nothing left. Astrid was one of those other ones, who inhabited her looks. They were hers and she lived there.

He’d met her after dark, in the gardens of the Northern Alliance guesthouse in Faizabad, in the October of 2001. The generators were down and all he could see of her to begin with was her silhouette against the stars. The stars were thickly sown and distinct and the river roared where it bent around the rocks at the foot of the outcrop the guesthouse stood on. To Kellas it seemed that he and the other foreigners spread out among the bushes and trees, murmuring into their satellite phones, were sitting on the shore of the cosmos, listening to the roar of time. He was crouching on the grass with his head back, gawping at the Milky Way, when he heard her moving, and she stood over him.

Astrid’s satphone batteries were all used up. She asked if she could call her editor and her father on Kellas’s phone. He’d already made the same sort of calls in the same sort of order, and told her she could talk for as long as she liked. He stood a little distance away. There was a green glow from the phone display. It touched her face but he couldn’t see her. It had just been her dark shape moving like
a wing across the starfield and her voice asking to use his phone. So in those first minutes he only knew her by her voice. She sounded preoccupied with herself, but when she spoke there was a hesitancy and an opening-up, a kind of respecting shyness, as if to her everyone was wise until proven a fool, and she didn’t want to risk missing the thoughtful ones.

When Astrid finished her calls, they stood and talked in the gardens. They’d both arrived that day, Kellas by plane from Tajikistan, Astrid overland in one of the convoys from Dushanbe, across the Aru Darya river, then east by truck. Neither had been to Afghanistan before.

‘They have a way of looking at us here. At us, the foreigners,’ said Astrid. ‘They make me feel less real than they are. They make me feel recorded and projected, like I can be switched off and not exist, while they go on existing. I’m going to sit down. I’m not feeling so good.’

They sat on the dirt. Kellas was starting to be able to see by the starlight and he saw that Astrid had a narrow face, with high cheekbones and a wide, finely delineated mouth. When she frowned, which she did often when she spoke, as if to reassure others and herself that she was thinking seriously, a dense pattern of four horizontal lines appeared on her forehead – they made her look older, and carried pain; when she smiled, the lines vanished and her face shone with more happiness than she could possibly use for herself. There was enough there for everyone.

He could see by the tired, impatient way she moved that she was sick and uncomfortable. His transition had been sharper than Astrid’s. He hadn’t known that morning if he would fly or not and until the lizard-coloured transport plane had taken off from Dushanbe airport, he doubted. He and the other foreign journalists and Alliance Afghans sat on canvas seats against the fuselage. In between them, occupying most of the aircraft’s cargo space, sat two tons of bottled water for CNN. Forty minutes after they took off they landed on a stretch of roughly flattened earth and stones
surfaced with the steel strips put down by military engineers when they’re in a hurry. They walked out of the plane off the back ramp into a cloud of dust from the aircraft’s propellers and when it cleared they could see a line of Afghans waiting and watching, letting the dust settle on them. For the children the arrival of the plane was the final grand, ridiculous piece of stage machinery in the play of the day, and they jumped, singing in English, ‘How are you? How are you?’ Most of the others were drivers, but not importuning. They held back and waited for the foreigners to come to them. One of the Afghans waiting seemed to have no reason to be there other than to watch the plane come in. He looked at Kellas with blank intensity, with his hands behind his back. It was a look Kellas hadn’t seen before, and would see again in Afghanistan, the look of clever, curious and uneducated men, lusting for a messenger. They would fight and die for their religion here but a bold man could write his own religion in eyes like that, if he dared and the religion was bright enough.

Kellas put his gear into a Uazik and for twenty-five dollars was driven into town along a cratered highway. On either side of the road, traders were lighting kerosene lamps in their wooden booths. There was a smell of cooking fires. The country was rich in darkness and its lights and fires shone against it correspondingly, like gems in fur. Kellas’s doubts in London belonged to someone else. He was glad that he had been sent to this other world to carry out tasks, to report back. There were duties and some were his.

‘I might stay here a long time,’ said Astrid. ‘It clears my head. Kinda…exalted. Can you excuse me for a moment?’ She moved to the edge of the garden. Kellas heard her retching and coughing. He heard a limb slipping through grass, a cry and the sound of a branch breaking. He ran over and caught Astrid’s wrists as she slid down a steep embankment towards the sheer rocks above the river. He helped her scramble up and she thanked him. Her wrists were cold and clammy and she was trembling slightly. He put his hand on her forehead. It was cool and damp.

‘That was so clumsy,’ said Astrid, laughing in relief. ‘I shouldn’t have tried to throw up in the river.’

‘That’s what they drink here, too,’ said Kellas.

‘Yeah,’ said Astrid. ‘I don’t think I’ve got any of it on me.’

‘You need to be warm,’ said Kellas. They went back to the guesthouse as the generator started up and the lights came on. He made sure the Poles she was sharing a room with got her, shivering, into her sleeping bag and he came back later with some mutton and rice the Afghans had cooked, a glass of tea and a couple of ibuprofen tablets. Astrid consumed it all. A group of Swiss was taking two Uaziks to Jabal os Saraj the day after tomorrow, she said, they could both go with them. Kellas said she should rest more.