We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

by James Meek

  ‘I got up early. I was out there and back by ten. The guy, Jalaluddin. He was so bereft. Fuck.’

  Kellas had forgotten the name of the husband, although he had written it down. He did remember the man’s bereftness when the reporters left him sitting on the ruins of his house.

  ‘I gave him money,’ said Astrid, looking past Kellas into space. ‘Kinda wish I hadn’t. Like I was trying to buy something. A hundred bucks.’

  ‘It wasn’t your bomb.’

  ‘Oh, it was my bomb,’ said Astrid absently. ‘They’re all my bombs.’ She looked at him. ‘Did you give him something?’

  ‘Yeah. Same amount.’

  ‘Here,’ said Astrid. She closed the laptop, tucked it under her arm and put her free hand into one of her anorak pockets. She took out a couple of Duracells and held them out to him. ‘Mark said you needed some.’

  Kellas thanked her and lifted the batteries from her hand. His fingertips touched her palm. He felt the trace of damp in the lines that crossed it and the warmth that the heat of the computer had left there.

  ‘Thanks. I don’t know when I can give these back,’ he said. Astrid was opening her laptop again. The cuffs of the anorak rustled against it.

  ‘But you will, right?’ she said.

  ‘As soon as I can.’

  ‘Don’t forget!’ she said over her shoulder. She was smiling when she said it. Kellas called after her to see if she wanted to take a walk later, but she didn’t answer.

  December 2002

  2

  When the express to Heathrow left Paddington, Kellas’s mobile phone vibrated in his pocket. Although he had no intention of answering, he took it out and looked at the display each time he felt the buzz. It was his voicemail. He had eighteen new messages. He had twenty text messages, and forty missed calls.

  If he’d had the kind of mobile in Afghanistan that could take pictures, a year ago, Kellas would have a photo of Astrid now. Perhaps it was best that he hadn’t. She wouldn’t have aged. She was thirty-four then. But a person’s nature shows in motion and change, and this made the stillness of every portrait photograph a kind of lie. Memory was more plastic. The gap between how you remembered a friend and how they were when you met again could be pinched, joined and smoothed over by memory when there was no photograph in the way. Now that Kellas had a camera phone, he knew the game, where you kept taking pictures of each other until you were left with a single image that pleased you both. If months passed without meeting again, the agreed truth of the moment became its possessor’s holy image. You either stopped believing it, or you began to give it your faith.

  The phone buzzed with an SMS from Liam Cunnery. Psychotherapist says Tara showing signs of post-traumatic stress. Well done Adam.

  The train had left the station at nine a.m.; Kellas was catching a flight to New York at eleven. Was it possible that Cunnery had got Tara in to see a psychiatrist able to diagnose post-traumatic stress in a ten-year-old child in the nine hours since midnight? He could have. He had a confident private school voice and an alert, sly, bright-eyed ‘Follow me!’ look, promising London mind-healers that they, too, could be part of the international struggle for the rights of the oppressed in which Cunnery acted as invigilator. Alternatively, there was patronage. A thousand-word opinion piece in the weekly Cunnery edited, Left Side, was still a prize for an ambitious shrink. The claim of post-traumatic stress was more dubious. Didn’t you have to wait for the trauma to be at least a day old before the post-stage kicked in? Cunnery’s use of ‘psychotherapist’ in full, in a text message, struck Kellas. Cunnery tended to the brisk and cheery in his personal communication and to the apocalyptic and enraged in his magazine. Tall, sallow and well-dressed, slightly hunched, he moved between restaurants and offices in Clerkenwell, Bloomsbury and Westminster with a set smile on his face and a permanent furrow of concentration in his brow, like a surgeon in the soaps. Women told each other they were ready to be seduced by him, but he wasn’t interested in that direction. As a lover, he stayed close to his wife Margot. An ectoplasm of higher purpose lingered in his wake. Even indoors, he seemed to be cutting through slipstream, as if the wind of change couldn’t resist playing with his soft fair hair wherever he was. When you caught him in a good mood it meant that some atrocity had been committed in a country far away for which the British government, the American government, capitalism, the IMF, the World Bank, multinational corporations and the Vatican must be held responsible, regardless of the identity of the victims and perpetrators. The only time Kellas had seen him gloomy was when the Soviet Union fell in. Cunnery’s depression lasted for a day or two before he realised that the end of the communist superpower meant the last constraint to blaming everything atrocious on Washington and capitalism had been removed. It gratified Kellas that now, when Cunnery considered his own young daughter had been involved in an atrocity, he didn’t blame the White House or the World Bank. He blamed Adam Kellas.

  The train gathered speed through west London. The December sky showed in turquoise wedges between ramps and pillars and the sun seared white patches on nettles and hawthorns and two-litre cider bottles by the trackside. Kellas heard Afghanistan mentioned on the BBC news bulletin being played back inside the carriage. The screen opposite showed a still picture of Hamid Karzai. A new moment of inaccuracy by the United States Air Force was being reported. Kellas hadn’t been back to Afghanistan since he bought a place on a helicopter out of the Panjshir valley a few months after arriving. With the helicopter roaring and bouncing off the ground and the co-pilot looking back over his shoulder to check everyone had paid up, with the loadmaster in corduroy trousers and a leather jacket shaking a fist stuffed with dollars at Kellas and Astrid and shrieking ‘Six hundred! Six hundred!’ over the noise of the engine, with the twenty other foreigners and Afghans wedged into place over luggage and fuel tanks and looking robbed and nervous and impatient, Kellas had given his money to the loadmaster and Astrid had put hers back in the pocket of her jeans. She’d shouted in Kellas’s ear: ‘I’m not coming. Don’t call me’, grabbed her rucksack and jumped out of the open door. Kellas made it to the edge after her, with the loadmaster’s hand squeezing his upper arm and yelling in Dari, and saw her already fifty feet, sixty feet away on the flattened grass below the rising helicopter, sprawled where she’d fallen, getting up, hoisting her rucksack on her shoulders and walking to the cluster of drivers and officials without looking back, the tails of her headscarf writhing in the last of the helicopter’s downdraft. Then they were atoms of colour on the sliver of green and mulberry groves by the tilted blade of the river, and the mountains pressed in around the gasping aircraft like the hands of blind giants seeking a dragonfly by its hum, and the loadmaster half-flung Kellas to a place away from the door. That was the last time he’d seen or heard from Astrid, until a few hours ago, when he’d picked up her email begging him to come to see her immediately.

  She’d been strong for a skinny-armed, thin-shanked woman, the way she toted that rucksack. It would sit upright on the ground, sagging at the top, and she would bend at the waist to hoist it. Her wrists would poke out thin and white from the sleeves of her too-big anorak, her fringe would hang down and her jaw would come forward a little way. A sound would come from her lungs as she held the strap of the rucksack and took its weight and swung it onto her back. One time he had offered to help and she shook her head. She would notice him watching her. Sometimes she would smile and sometimes she would not, but she would never look him in the eyes until the rucksack was up on her back and the straps were tight. More than once in Afghanistan Kellas had caught himself thinking about the sound, the exhalation with voice, which came from her involuntarily as the weight pressed on her. He thought of the air in her breast, and the rush of it in her larynx, and the bones containing them, and the flesh around them. He’d recognised the thing of which this tiny sound was the centre: a fascination. A fascination was what came about when a single life wasn’t enough to contain the presence of someone else in
side him. He needed to be running two or three lives at once. Not even words had made the fascination, just the flex of her limbs and the tiny sound as she took the strain of her pack. Just those things had crossed into him, and faint as the chances were, he wanted to follow them back to their source.

  On the train Kellas’s skin prickled. He had no idea where his bag was. He began to get up from his seat, then remembered he had no luggage, only his passport, wallet and mobile and the clothes he was wearing, a black linen suit, a white shirt with a bloodstained right sleeve, and a pair of black leather boots, city boots, with smooth soles and side zips. He’d abandoned his coat at the Cunnerys’ and spent the night at a hotel because he’d been afraid to go home. If he’d gone back to his flat in Bow and picked up Astrid’s message there he would have packed a bag of some kind but still, flying across the Atlantic without anything to carry was something he’d never done. He’d imagined it like this, that he’d be travelling alone, answering an urgent call, discarding all burdens, walking away from things he should attend to if duty were the only consideration. He’d imagined that he wouldn’t have to worry about money on the journey, and this, too, had come about. A publisher was offering him an advance of a hundred thousand pounds for world rights to Rogue Eagle Rising, the thriller he’d begun in Afghanistan. The book was finished.

  Just before going to Central Asia Kellas had been to stay for a few days with M’Gurgan and his wife Sophie in Dumfries. They had a two-storey Victorian terraced house faced in red stone in the middle of town. Kellas had grown up in one like it on the mirror side of Scotland, on the north-east. It must have seemed to adult visitors then like the M’Gurgan place seemed to him now, with the same unbalanced, clashing, comfortable slew of furniture, home-painted sticks from the auctions and the one good sofa, scuffed walls with crayon marks, the fortune in derelict toys and electronics stacked in dusty piles on wardrobe tops. There was a working light bulb in every room, but not always a lampshade around it. Clothes of all ages and sizes were drying in at least two rooms and any place not immediately accessible to a simple vacuum cleaner had a miniature rockfall of bran flakes and plastic soldiers uncleared against it. Kellas and M’Gurgan had been at school together for six years before they left Duncairn and M’Gurgan, who’d lived in an almost bookless bungalow in one of the new estates by the Aberdeen road, envied the Kellas bookshelves, spread along hallways, hung under ceilings and crammed between chimney breasts. He ran his hand back and forth against the spines of an old set of Dickens that had belonged to Kellas’s grandfather, swore when he saw how Kellas’s mother had repaired with insulating tape a first edition of Deaths and Entrances from the same collection, and pressed his nose against the pages of an early Alice in Wonderland. He ran his nostril up the margin and inhaled, lifted his face, big and rosy already at fourteen years old, grinned till his cheeks dimpled and said to Kellas: ‘I feel like I just sniffed the Reverend Charles Dodgson’s stash of young girls’ knickers.’ This was beyond Kellas at the time. After M’Gurgan had gone, he took the book to his room and sniffed the pages till he sneezed but couldn’t and didn’t want to believe that girls’ underwear smelled of damp basements. In Dumfries, M’Gurgan the patriarch, by his own boast, wanted to emulate and surpass the Kellas family home library and had done so. Every hallway was narrowed by bookshelves, books ran along the tops of doorways, books advanced in steps up the wall beside the staircase, lined the windowsills and occupied the flat tops of toilet cisterns. M’Gurgan wrote in the half-converted attic, in a tiny cell walled-in by books and lit by a well of sky from a roughly glassed-over hole punched in the roof.

  Dinner was unlike the Kellas dinners of his childhood. The television didn’t stand at the head of the table, it was absent from the kitchen where the M’Gurgans ate. The table was loud, busy and brawly, illuminated by fights between the two M’Gurgan daughters from his first marriage and the son and by decent wine. M’Gurgan insisted that the children, who were aged from eleven to sixteen, drank wine. He poured them each full glasses, topped off with a finger of tap water. Sophie watched without saying anything, waiting for her husband’s folly to meet its natural punishment. M’Gurgan proposed a toast to Kellas and raised his glass. Kellas and Sophie raised theirs and the children, as if by prior agreement, sat with their arms crossed, staring at their father.

  ‘Children, I’d really appreciate it if you’d raise your glasses and drink a toast to our friend Adam, who’s come all the way from London to see us, and who’s going to Afghanistan next week,’ said M’Gurgan.

  ‘He hasn’t come to see us, he’s come to see you and Sophie,’ said Angela. ‘What would he be coming to see me for? I’m a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl and he’s a forty-year-old man.’

  ‘Thirty-seven,’ said Kellas.

  ‘Like there’s a difference,’ said Angela, looking steadfastly and dangerously at her father. ‘I’m going to tell at school that you’re getting me drunk and pimping me out to old men.’ Carrie, the older girl, glanced at Kellas and giggled.

  ‘Angela, I don’t want you using that gangster language,’ said Sophie.

  ‘What’s pimping?’ said the boy, Fergus.

  M’Gurgan said: ‘I would like you all to show a little respect to me, your father, to my friend Adam, and to this 1996 Bordeaux, which I paid fifteen pounds for at Haddows.’

  ‘It smells like bus shelters,’ said Angela.

  ‘You shouldn’t be encouraging us. We’re not old enough for binge drinking,’ said Carrie.

  ‘It’s not binge drinking!’ shouted M’Gurgan, banging his fist on the table. ‘It’s civilised – European – French – Jean-Paul fucking Sartre culture.’

  ‘Oh, I feel dead civilised now,’ murmured Angela. ‘If you’re wanting us to drink alcohol, how come I can’t have a blue Margarita?’

  M’Gurgan’s face darkened and he stretched his arm out at Kellas. ‘Do you realise that by this time next week, Adam could be blown to pieces by a landmine? Sorry, Adam.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Kellas. ‘Hope I won’t, though.’ He grinned. ‘Cheers,’ he said, raised his glass and took a drink.

  ‘Aye, cheers,’ said M’Gurgan. The prospect of Kellas’s violent death soothed everyone and the daughters took prim sips of wine. Angela wrinkled her nose and stuck out her tongue and Fergus, who’d already emptied his glass, held it out for more.

  As the meal drew to its end, with the second bottle almost empty and the children gone, Kellas began to feel the fright before his confession hopping in his stomach. He wanted to receive the same kind of shallow loving anger M’Gurgan had shown Carrie and Angela. True disappointment would be tolerable. The worst would be understanding, the absence of surprise. He feared M’Gurgan had expected him to sell out all along. He was about to ask M’Gurgan how his fantasy trilogy was coming along. Sophie spoke before he could open his mouth, to ask if he was still seeing Melissa.

  ‘It was a mistake,’ said Kellas.

  ‘Who’s that? Did I meet her?’ said M’Gurgan.

  ‘You know you did,’ said Sophie. ‘The posh one.’

  ‘Oh, I remember her,’ said M’Gurgan, smiling. He twirled his empty glass by the stem and tapped the rim against his upper lip. He regarded Kellas. ‘I remember you explaining that.’

  ‘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.

  ‘Lia
m 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 scientific 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.