We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

by James Meek

  Kellas asked a reporter he knew from the Prague years if he’d seen Astrid.

  ‘She was here earlier,’ the reporter said. ‘She asked about you. She wanted to know about your wandering days. She seemed disappointed when I told her you’d moved back to London to settle down.’

  ‘Disappointed,’ repeated Kellas. He watched Jalaluddin drift away from the burial place, his shoulders bent and his body racked with trembling.

  ‘I’ve had enough,’ said the reporter. ‘I’ve been to too many strangers’ funerals in places like this. I want stories where I can be home for supper. I want stories I can wear cardigans to. I miss my children.’

  They saw Jalaluddin talking to a group of village men, who shook his hand and left him. Jalaluddin looked up at the ruins of his house, where his neighbours were starting to sort good bricks from the rubble. He climbed a little way up the heap, slowly and doubtfully parted some earthen shapes, then stopped, dropped the lumps he was holding, and sat down. He bent his head a little. Kellas went over to him, followed by Mohamed. Kellas asked Mohamed if he should give him money. Mohamed said it’d be a good thing. Kellas took a million in the local currency out of his pocket, about twenty-five dollars, and gave it to Mohamed to give to Jalaluddin. He shook Jalaluddin’s hand and told Mohamed to tell him that he hoped life would become good again. Mohamed said something and gave Jalaluddin the money and Jalaluddin took it without looking at it or them and murmured something.

  ‘He says God be praised for your kindness,’ said Mohamed.

  ‘Did he really say “God be praised for your kindness?”’ said Kellas as they walked away. ‘Did he mean it?’ He trusted Mohamed least when he was translating the small courtesies of the poor. Mohamed tended to snobbery when he was bored, which he often was. His view, Kellas suspected, was that the poor could not afford to depart from stock platitudes, and if they did, he would correct them by translating what they should have said. Kellas and Mohamed began to walk back to the car. Kellas looked round once and saw that Jalaluddin hadn’t moved. He sat still with his head bowed, looking at nothing, the money in his hand, while his neighbours threw bricks on their pile with exaggerated energy.

  Kellas leaned forward, pulled out the airline’s entertainment guide and leafed through the films on offer. He took a glass of champagne from the tray offered by the attendant. Sweet Home Alabama. That had been kindly reviewed, Reese Witherspoon revealing a talent for mainstream romantic comedy. It’d been that night, the night after he’d gone to the village and met Jalaluddin, that he had lost his temper with the sentry boy and shoved him in the chest and screamed at him that it was his fucking chair. One of those moments of rage that seemed to come from nowhere, but couldn’t, since Kellas experienced them so seldom. He could still replay his shout exactly as it had sounded in the darkness, so loud as to be distorted in his ears, and remember how it felt when his palm touched the boy’s warm bony chest. If he’d taken up The Citizen’s speculative offer of psychiatric counselling, shyly suggested by the managing editor like a father slipping a drugs counselling service brochure under his son’s door, he could have made it sound neat and sympathetic. Sensitive, liberal Kellas goes to the village where the careless executioner of war has carried out his fatal warrant. Kellas’s heart begins to bleed. His conscience swells to enormous size, pokes into his brain and turns it to poisoned mush. I had a breakdown, doctor. War is so cruel and my noggin is so fragile. I don’t know what came over me. I lost control. A cheap doctor nods and understands. A smart doctor would tell Kellas he was lying. How come, smart doctor asks, you didn’t lose control when the Taliban let three rockets off into the market in Charikar when you were there and there were body parts everywhere? If you were so frazzled that afternoon, what’s with you being fly enough to lie to Astrid about how much money you gave to Jalaluddin? If you were all cut up by the cruelty of war, what’s with sitting down that evening at your crippled desk to write your bullshit novel? Smart doctor sees into Kellas. Smart doctor says: I know you. You know I do. I don’t see you made berserk by bombing. The way you went for that Afghan boy was something else. Like a man in a mask and helmet and goggles looking down through a Perspex canopy at something far away he doesn’t understand, and the only way he can try to understand it is to hit it.

  Kellas had finished his champagne. He looked around for a refill. The woman next to him was coming back to her seat after applying a fresh layer of crimson lipstick, which contrasted appealingly with her pale skin and the perfect white of her suit. She smiled at Kellas as she sat down and picked up her book.

  ‘Don’t move,’ said Kellas.

  ‘What?’ The woman smiled again, less easily.

  ‘I remember,’ said Kellas carefully, ‘that when I was a child I used to play with my mother’s lipstick – don’t move! – not to put it on, I mean, only to make the stick come in and out of the tube, it looked like a robot’s tongue, and sometimes tiny flakes of it would fall off. I’m surprised now, thirty years later, that they haven’t got around to making lipstick that doesn’t flake – keep still, I’m nearly finished – there’s a piece on the lapel of your jacket. Don’t brush it off! You’ll smear it.’

  ‘I can use my fingernail.’ She had an American accent, and Chinese features.

  ‘No. I know a better way. This is how the vacuum cleaner was invented.’

  ‘You brought a vacuum cleaner on the plane?’

  ‘Wait.’ Kellas took a paper napkin from his table, peeled off a single sheet of the two-ply tissue, exhaled till his lungs were almost empty, and placed the tissue over his slightly open mouth. He began to inhale gently and lowered his mouth to the woman’s lapel where the crimson mote lay. With the tissue paper fluttering against the stiff cloth he sucked in sharply, pulled away and folded the cloth in his right hand. He picked apart the folds with his fingers and pointed to the minute speck of lipstick. The woman looked down at her lapel. There was no mark. She laughed and clapped her hands a couple of times.

  ‘Well, thank you, sir,’ she said. ‘That was smooth. Do you always put a tissue over your mouth when you do that?’ They both laughed and blushed.

  ‘An old girlfriend taught me,’ said Kellas. ‘The only other time I tried it, I made a terrible mess.’

  ‘Either way, it’s an introduction, right?’ Her name was Elizabeth Chang. She was from Shanghai – ‘CBC,’ she said, ‘Chinese-born Chinese’ – her family lived in Boston, she was studying art history at Oxford. It was her second degree. She was on her way to visit a friend in New York. There were diamonds set in the gold of her earstuds. She was big, not fat but tall and broad and strong. She had a deep, hearty laugh, like an older woman’s, which made Kellas feel comfortable, and she laughed readily, at the slightest hint of a joke.

  ‘Oh, my God, my friend’s a writer!’ said Elizabeth after she asked what he did, and he told her. ‘She’s just got an amazing deal with Karpaty Knox for her first novel.’

  ‘That’s my American publisher,’ said Kellas. ‘I’m signing the contract for my book there this afternoon.’

  Elizabeth congratulated him.

  ‘Thanks. Karpaty Knox, you know, and my British publishers, they’re owned by this old French publishing house, Éditions Perombelon. The guy who runs the operation, Didier, he made his Anglo-Saxons buy it. He liked the plot. He had me go over to Paris to meet him. How much is your friend’s deal worth, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘A million dollars.’

  ‘That’s a lot of money,’ Kellas said, after a moment. ‘How old’s your friend?’

  Patricia Lee Heung, the friend, was the same age as Elizabeth, and, like her, had been born in Shanghai and emigrated to America with her family as a teenager. Her novel was called Red Hearth, White Crane. It was a multi-generational saga about a young woman whose Chinese mother dies in childbirth, is persuaded by her communist lover to help assassinate her American father, suffers persecution by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution, escapes to America, rises to wealth as a
luxury Chinese cookware manufacturer, gets romanced by a handsome young American who marries her and tricks her out of her fortune, returns to China as capitalism becomes legal, and meets her former communist lover, now a recently widowed software billionaire. He begs her forgiveness, and they marry, with a glamorous wedding. The book ends with the children from their previous marriages graduating top of their class at Harvard together.

  ‘That being tricked out of your fortune, it’s a bitch,’ said Kellas.

  ‘Listen to you, Mr First Class Traveller! You don’t like that kind of book, do you?’

  ‘Is it a kind of book?’

  ‘Yeah, the kind of book where brave good-looking people overcome their problems, get rich, fall in love, get married, have children and live happily ever after. That’s the kind of book American and Chinese people want to read.’

  ‘That’s one and a half billion bookmarks. Better alert the trade.’

  ‘Maybe they should be reading yours. What’s it about?’ She’d become a little aggressive on her friend’s behalf. She was enjoying herself. Kellas looked out of the window. An unbroken plain of biscuity cloud spread to the horizon. The champagne was getting warm, but he kept on drinking it.

  ‘It’s a thriller,’ he said.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘It’s set in the present. It’s about a war between Europe and America.’

  ‘That’ll never happen!’ Elizabeth looked as if he’d uttered something profane. Her expression made Kellas feel better about the book than at any time since he’d finished it.

  ‘Probably it won’t,’ said Kellas. ‘It’s a novel. It’s a work of the imagination. Mind you, America is a work of the imagination, too. It’s real now. But it was imagined first.’

  ‘So what happens? The Americans start bombing London?’

  ‘No,’ said Kellas. As she said it, the words had that strange potency of the literally possible combined with the fantastic – the first characteristics of pornography – that had made him begin to fidget with the idea in the first place. ‘An American army unit gets into trouble when it intervenes in the Middle East and commits a horrible atrocity trying to escape. The troops arrive in Europe on their way back to America and the Europeans decide that they have to try to arrest them and put them on trial. The American government says the Europeans have to let them go.’

  Elizabeth asked what it was called. When he told her, she laughed. ‘It sounds like one of those big fat paperbacks with huge metallic letters on the cover and an explosion on the front. They always have something like Rogue Eagle in the title. Ultimate this and Final that.’

  ‘It is. It is one of those. And that is how you make the title. I drew a grid. Adjectives on the left, nouns on the right.’

  ‘Why did you want to write a book like that?’

  ‘To make money. To be read.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You look disappointed.’

  ‘What I said about the kind of book people want to read,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I mean, despite what I said. I like to think there are people out there writing books that I can only read by working hard at it, even if I never do read them. Even if I never do the work. I like to think that there are writers left who don’t give a fuck, you know? “Here’s my book. You don’t like it, you can go fuck yourself, I don’t care.” I’m like my dad, I suppose. He’d run a mile if he saw some tough guy coming after him with a club. But he likes to think they’re out there. He watches The Sopranos. He wants to think there are tough guys. He wants them to be real. That’s me with difficult books. I’m probably never going to read them and the guys who write them probably know that most people are like me and the way they still keep on writing those difficult books is sort of touching, you know?’

  ‘I don’t know why you thought I was that kind of writer.’

  ‘You don’t dress like I imagine a thriller writer would dress. You don’t have any carry-on. I’m not being rude, but you look as if you slept in your clothes. And there’s blood on your shirt cuff.’

  The cuffs had slipped out of the sleeves of Kellas’s jacket. He told Elizabeth he’d had a kind of accident the night before and she asked him to tell her what had happened.

  ‘I’m not good at telling stories out loud,’ said Kellas.

  ‘You’re a writer!’

  ‘Why am I supposed to be able to talk as well? I’ll try and tell you what happened. But I’ll hesitate, I’ll repeat myself. I’ll tell you too much about some of the people and use the names of others I forgot to tell you about. I’ll begin in the middle, go to the end, and then go back to the beginning, and end in the middle. Everything is middle.’

  Elizabeth leaned forward, put her hand on his forearm and said: ‘This is all you telling me that the reason you became a writer is you can’t talk too well. And yet you’ve been yakking away at me about your book and your life ever since we took off.’ Kellas laughed. ‘If you’re going to tell me a story, tell it. Otherwise you might as well shut up. I’m right, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Kellas. He was still laughing.

  The moving map in front of him showed the northern tip of Ireland and the Western Isles nudging off the edge of the screen. Words of ink and words of air. Forty lifetimes and all the ink from Bibles to Google hadn’t chased it out of them, the hour the Celts learned that there was an art called writing, and an art called reading. Still they harboured it there in the west, still they had bards and druids in the inmost bulb of their onion hearts. In the way of their speaking, like the sound of a blast of melted rock and ash still circling the world long after the crater is cold, he could still hear the far whisper of the anger at the deed of writing words down, soaking their words of air in ink till they were sodden and sank. They’d learned and overmastered the art, sure, but in their pubs and beds and at their wakes and wooing they still resisted. Even that they weren’t all Behans and Thomases and M’Gurgans to be known so surely. Or even Celts. Just to cleave to the idea that speech could be a song, that speech might be a song.

  ‘I was at a dinner party,’ said Kellas. ‘Last night. I lost my temper and some things got broken. One of the guests was this guy, Pat M’Gurgan, an old friend of mine. I was at school with him. His parents were Irish. They moved to the east coast of Scotland when he was small. He could tell you the story better than I could. He’s a writer too. He started out as a poet and he’s just written a novel which is doing well. It’s called The Book of Form. It won prizes.’

  ‘But he’s not here, so…’

  ‘What you need to know about Pat M’Gurgan is that he’s a bard. The thing is – what I’m saying is – there’s two kinds of writers, bards and priests. It hasn’t changed since it began. The bard is the one who talks. He talks so well that everyone thinks he must be a beautiful writer, and sometimes he is. But the words come out of his mouth with this great love of speech and skill. He entertains. He tells stories. He knows jokes. He draws a crowd in a bar, he exaggerates, he lies so beautifully that even people who know they’re being lied to love it. He laughs at himself. He can cry as well, and talk about love all night. He turns the dead into heroes and the living into villains and clowns. He remembers the people he meets and makes history out of things that have only just happened. You know what I mean? You know that bard, don’t you – you were there! You saw the same things! But to you, it was just daily moments, and to him, he can make a story out of it. He loves small crowds. He loves attention. He’s an agent of instant glory for anyone he likes. He charms the ones he desires and when he leaves, the whole room misses him. When he’s alone, he feels miserable, and thinks everyone hates him, and wonders if he’s shallow. He’s weak. He drinks.’