Red Birds

by Mohammed Hanif

  We are no match for this first-world army of ghosts with the finest armoury any military unit can lay its hands on. We don’t know what other powers they might have. They are already hovering in the air, floating. And they are motivated. They don’t even have to fight to the finish as they are already finished. Time is on their side.

  I think we should go back while we can. I can understand a mother’s feelings. I don’t have to go through breastfeeding, labour, pregnancy and unprotected sex to know how mothers feel. There is a lot of empirical data to tell us about their feelings, there is a lot of literature and poetry and camel-loads of folklore to tell us how mothers feel at any given time. She wants her son back, who wouldn’t? But this is a horror show. Will you get all your family killed to save your son? This is tribal thinking; she is a prisoner of her own feudal traditions. She is not evolved enough. This kind of thinking leads to radicalization of young minds. Throw everything you have got at your perceived enemy. Destroy yourself before it destroys you. You become the enemy. In the process of trying to eliminate the other you become the other.

  Just because I don’t have a child doesn’t mean that I am heartless. I understand her dilemma. She has lost a son and she is willing to sacrifice her other son to get him back. I can understand all of that but does she have to dye her hair red? Not only does she look like a witch, she is drawing attention to herself. You go into a battle in camouflage. You try to blend in with your environment. I am wearing grey from head to toe. This woman is going to get us killed. Now there she is standing in front of Momo’s big gun. Blocking his sight. Trying to sabotage her own mission. She might be a grieving mother, and she needs proper counselling, but what she needs right now is a slap and I wish I could give it to her.

  And I am going to tell these ghosts where to go. I have heard they listen to reason. I should have known that I am the only reasonable person in the Hangar, the others are ghosts or are trying to become one. Doctor is the only man of science here. And he has got a bike and he has got fuel. I should ask him for a lift and ride out of here as soon as I can.

  CHAPTER 47

  Ellie

  Colonel Slatter seems tired. He has the same bravado, his preferred mode of communication still more hand gestures than verbs, but he seems weary of talking to a world that doesn’t understand him anymore.

  ‘Remember my parties,’ he says, as I sidle up to him. ‘Open-door policy. All welcome. Remember when we got those Kandaharis to dance with us. Gave them our guns. And they fired in the air, it’s their culture, they fire in the air when they celebrate a birth or a wedding, it’s part of their culture. Remember, they sang us a song. And they were our prisoners. And they danced. Fun times. We danced with our prisoners.’ Colonel Slatter stares into my eyes as if he wants me to be the official witness to a life well lived.

  I have no recollection of that particular party. Sure, I remember being at a party but it was in our bachelors’ quarters, not in Kandahar. I do remember I have never set foot in Kandahar; flown over it, sure, who hasn’t? ‘Yes, good times,’ I say.

  Slatter grunts. ‘Did you have to invite this riff-raff? Gone native, eh? Like those flat breads and even flatter brown bums,’ he says. ‘Forgotten your own?’

  ‘They are here for the boy,’ I say. ‘I didn’t bring them. They brought me. You have their boy. They want their boy. Give them their boy.’

  ‘Oh that boy was here somewhere. Who do you think brought me down? Who do you think brought you here? That little rascal who fiddled with our comms. The boy has got talent, he is a bit like us. Now he is going to help us out of here. We’re teaching him to fly. Stubborn little thing. Says he’d rather eat sand than learn to fly. No aptitude, but we’ve got to teach him. We’ve got to pull this shithole out of the Stone Age. We can’t be stuck here forever, we need to get out. He wants to get out of here too. We are on the same page, you see.’ I study his mouth. The dead don’t smile.

  ‘Sir, that’s not funny at all,’ I say.

  ‘Damn straight, do I look like a joker to you?’ he says. ‘That boy is going to learn to fly and lead us out of here. Otherwise we’re kind of stuck, can’t you see? You know the routine or have you forgotten? Think of the children. Always think of the children. They really are our future.’

  ‘Why here?’ I ask. ‘Why now?’

  ‘Central Command keep up the pretence that we are still around, still on duty, still serving God and country. So these hubs are kept alive, with rotations, rations, pending leaves, a perfect facade. They do it in the hope that we will fade away. The Staff and Command disappears, then the planes disappear. They want to have a cut-price war. They can’t be bothered to look for us, let alone take us home. Now we are just slashed budgets. They hope that we’ll disappear too. Do you know how love disappears? We slowly erase love from our hearts – don’t try too hard because then it’ll not dissipate fast enough – it starts with a tiny spot and then it spreads like forgetfulness. Mind you, it’s their philosophy not mine. Don’t mention the names.’

  Colonel Slatter went on a mission before I did. He doesn’t know he was found strapped to his seat, burnt to cinders. I am alive, I know it because I have got a headache. He is dead but he doesn’t know it. Maybe I can still reason with him.

  ‘Things are still better back home,’ I say. ‘What do you need that boy for? Let him go. Then we can all go back home.’

  ‘Once you’re here, you can’t go anywhere.’

  Maybe Slatter does know that he is a little bit dead.

  ‘Things have changed now,’ I say. ‘PTSD counselling, generation-five drugs. Scientific breakthroughs. Retraining. Uni programmes. With all your experience you could probably get a sociology degree.’

  Colonel Slatter has nothing but contempt for me. ‘Are you here for a hostage exchange? We are no kidnappers. That boy is here of his own accord. Signed a contract. Ask him. Free will. We are here because of him. We are giving him a job. We are training him. What else was he going to do in this shithole? He is too sensible to screw sheep and sell bootleg sugar. We are giving him a chance at a better life.’

  Colonel Slatter plans to give the boy a better life by taking his life. Where have I heard this before?

  ‘He is only a boy.’

  ‘We were boys once, weren’t we? He refuses to fly. Says it makes him airsick. But he’ll have to fly, to guide us out of this hellhole and then go home. End of contract. Nobody is going to breach their contract under my command.’

  The colour of my own skin is not going to save me. They’re not going to spare me. I need to stick by the natives then. There should be an army of red-haired women with daggers and rosaries coming to my rescue. But I know there is only one. And I am not her priority.

  I catch a glimpse of Cath, her head sticking out of an armoured car’s open latch. What is she doing trying to drive an armoured car? It doesn’t surprise me that she is here. I hope she at least knows she’s dead?

  Nobody seems to have got the memo around here.

  CHAPTER 48

  Mutt

  By the time I have managed to paw my way to the first pile of pancakes, it seems better sense is going to prevail, that peace and goodwill is going to break out like a plague. Someone fires a single shot suddenly, and then it’s so silent I can hear myself breathing, panting to be precise, my heart churning. Sometimes excesses are committed in battles, I think I have eaten more pancakes than a Mutt of my stature should have.

  Ghosts are trying to scare us away with their firepower. They don’t want to talk to us. I always prefer talking. I have spent long nights just talking, warning people not to sleep under those blue plastic roofs. I can hear another sound. There is a little thud over the roof of the Hangar. Then another, then another. The roof is probably made of something sturdy but it sounds like heavy raindrops falling on a tin roof. Something is falling on the roof and we don’t know what it is. And they don’t care what it is but it’s my job as the reconnaissance man – let’s say reconnaissance person – t
o anticipate what is coming. It’s a stampede on the roof now. Rainfall gives way to footfalls. Tender at first but it’s a stampede now, a playful stampede. Like a bunch of elephants teaching their elephant babies how to do a slow dance.

  And down here now they are still busy shouting at people to get out of the way. Mother Dear is standing in the middle, her red hair on fire, she is wielding her dagger. Now I can’t decide who is more dangerous here, whatever is on the roof trying to bring it down, or this woman with her sparkly dagger, her red hair flying, her eyes searching for Bro Ali.

  And now Lady Flowerbody steps up, she thinks this is the right time to lecture us about relationships. Is anybody asking why we came here in the first place? Where is Bro Ali? They can show off their guns or negotiate all they want, I am going to go and look for him. There are back doors and although all I can smell are stone walls and long, solitary nights, I must go figure it out. Here’s what distinguishes us from the human race: when a man has a full stomach he thinks of siestas and sexual activities; when this Mutt has eaten properly, this Mutt goes to work.

  CHAPTER 49

  Cath

  Always the same question. How are you feeling? Why are you feeling like this? Cath? I can feel whatever the fuck I am feeling, and why are you even bothering to ask if you are not going to do anything about my feelings? He skulked around as if he had nothing to do with the way I was feeling. And now here he is, back-slapping his mates. They fly toys that cost more than three hundred million dollars apiece and then come home and get headaches. Think of the children, they say, think of all the starving, dying children in the world, and thinking of the children they go and drop tons of bombs on some godforsaken place and then come home and need some ‘me time’. They start a war and after a few millions have died then suddenly remember the young ones. Think of the children, they say. All the wars in the world are an afterthought about dead children. No time to think about babies. And when there is a baby on the way, don’t call it a baby, because you never know. It’ll make you feel worse if something happens. That was the closest he came to feeling my pain. That was the last thing I remember. So I tried not to remember it as a baby, and when it started bleeding, it didn’t stop. And he was half a world away, rearranging the geography of some poor country. I try to remember nicer things like the first time we met.

  It’s quite obvious that he is having fun now. If I was him I wouldn’t want to go home either.

  This is just like the first time we met.

  We met at a party for which the invite said rooftop barbeque. Much later, after Ellie had already bought the ring, I found out that the barbeque bit was an inside joke, military speak for saying we are just checking out the meat on offer. I genuinely believed that it was no big deal if people invited you for dinner and then forgot to give you food. Who goes to these things for food anyway? A party at the rooftop of the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters’ anterooms is not anybody’s idea of a gourmet night. You have to get sloshed and show your support for the boys.

  I happened to be there on my Safe Cats commercial shoot and a kindly camera assistant had invited me and now he was sitting in a portly sergeant’s lap, whispering in his ear and giggling.

  The guy with the bald, shiny head was there, he was pretending to be a priest. He was obviously a senior officer. He was dressed in a maroon dressing gown with a matching beret, and insisted on baptizing everyone. In the dim fairy lights the anterooms looked like a series of interconnected caves. He kept talking very knowledgeably about the divine sanction of man’s love for men, especially man’s love for younger men. I decided to get baptized because there was a queue. It seemed like the polite thing to do. The priest baptized me with a few drops of absinthe from a plastic bottle. He shouted something in Latin, then poured a few drops of the green liquid into my reluctant mouth. A mock priest at a mock barbeque with real absinthe. My lips stung, my stomach rushed to my mouth, I constricted my throat and managed to keep it down. I did think I was doing it for the country.

  After he had baptized everyone, he blessed the barracks then poured the contents of his absinthe bottle into a large plastic bowl full of rum punch. It floated on the surface like a little oil pool. I tried to have a drink from it but felt a wave of nausea churning in my throat. I knew there was always a point when you regretted coming to a party but after you’d stayed past that point you knew it would be OK. I went out onto the wrought-iron balcony and sat on the ledge. I could hear the babble of army brats who, led by the priest, were all chanting something in Latin. It might have been Arabic for all I knew but it did sound like Latin. It was something ancient that people would sing at a small church without knowing the meaning of what they were singing. I felt an ancient loneliness and almost wished, although under any other circumstances I dreaded it, that someone would recognize me as the famous little girl who had died and come back to life. A strange claim to have for my minor fame.

  When I was seven years old I got meningitis and died. It wasn’t a mistake, all the graphs on the screens surrounding me had gone flat, the doctors had said their regrets and then the machines had started pulsating again and I had come back to life. I was front-page news before I even knew what a newspaper was. Sometimes I felt special, mostly I just felt self-pity. This came over me especially strongly in crowded rooms, in train stations, and in parties like this, where I felt immense loneliness and always wanted to be back home; sometimes the feeling was so intense that I couldn’t understand the point of being back from the dead. I looked at the flushed faces around me, a couple kissing tentatively, the officer priest was raising his paper cup again and again and shouting viva Kandahar, viva Kandahar and then just viva viva as if he was banging his head to some inner music and butting it against some inner wall. I wondered whether Kandahar was a girlfriend who had ditched him or maybe it was a piece of war machinery that he had once been in love with.

  I perched on the ledge and looked down and saw a lanky man holding the leashes of five dogs of varying sizes, almost being dragged by them. I smiled. I wasn’t sure if it was the absinthe or the fact that all five dogs were jostling for a position around the same pole. I wondered if anyone would notice if I slipped down off the ledge. One of the five dogs looked up from the lamp post and barked at me. I almost barked back, and then felt a hand on my shoulder. I kept looking at the dog instead of looking back at the person whose hand was pressing into my shoulder now. I wanted this moment to last, the hand on my shoulder seemed natural enough, but what if I looked up and saw another soldier with a story of Kandahar? I would definitely puke. I glanced at the dog, which was humping its lanky owner’s leg, then I threw my head back, laughing, and looked at him. He wore a T-shirt that said TRIBALS FOR TRIBECA. I sighed.

  He bent over to hear, thinking I was whispering something to him. Something metallic grazed my ear. Two metallic discs hanging from a silver chain became entangled with my earrings. I looked up again, throwing my head back; his Adam’s apple was gulping air as if he had trouble breathing. I never understood men who wore jewellery. Not that I understood men who had tattoos, moustaches, PhDs in anthropology or those who smoked in bed. I had never known a man in uniform before. How different could it be from your average bank teller or the cab service controller? Maybe they had real nightmares. I disentangled the metal plates from my earrings and read the inscription. Ellie, it said.

  What kind of man goes around wearing his own name around his neck? Either a pompous ass, or a brand victim or someone in imminent danger of forgetting their name. Or maybe it wasn’t his name at all, maybe it was his wife’s name or his mother’s. But what kind of man goes around with his mother’s name around his neck? I let go of the twin metal plates.

  ‘I died once.’ I said it as if telling him a small detail about my small town, like saying that I went to Buffalo Tech, my father left when I was four or my mother died of lung cancer.

  ‘I’ve seen you in those car insurance ads,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I get that kind of work all
the time because I died once and then came back to life. I’m supposed to be the softer face of death.’

  ‘I make a living doing that, I die every day.’

  I finally turned around. And looked up at him and found him staring down my neck.

  ‘You’re a soldier. You are all soldiers,’ I said with a smile, as if I had just been introduced to a room full of friendly hyenas.

  ‘Can I call you Cath?’ he said.

  ‘My full name is Catherine Scott Duval,’ I said. ‘But if you take me out of here, for a little walk maybe, you can call me what you like.’

  ‘I’m a pilot, operational,’ he said. ‘We give our planes pet names. It’s the same thing but slightly different.’

  ‘What’s your plane called?’ I asked.

  ‘Strike Eagle,’ he said. ‘SE2.’

  I should have known. He liked his weapon more than his wife. He planned, he scammed. It was always easier to bomb some far-off place than stay home and unload the dishwasher.

  But all that belongs in another life. It doesn’t matter now. If you don’t come home, baby, I’ll come to you. Now stop fighting and let’s go. We’re done with this world.

  CHAPTER 50

  Lady Flowerbody

  What people don’t realize is that relationships are sometimes complicated, a bit like international donor-funded projects; you have to work on them because it’s work, but you also have to work hard to keep your dignity. It doesn’t matter whether you are in a relationship with a local or a foreigner, the basis should be simple; pay me my fees on time, honour my contract, respect my culture, stay out of my physical space unless I invite you in.