by James Meek
Astrid reached into her pocket, took out a fifty-dollar bill and handed it to Kellas. He didn’t understand.
‘There’s a gas station on Maddox,’ she said. ‘You go back to the road and turn left, keep going the way we were walking. You’ll see it on your left. We need some booze.’
‘Are you coming?’
‘They’re assholes in there.’
Kellas looked down at the bill. He had it stretched out like a miniature map. He was reading the number ‘50’ over and over again.
‘That’ll get you five bottles of red wine,’ said Astrid.
‘Five?’
‘We’re not going to drink it all tonight!’ said Astrid, reaching out her foot and kicking him lightly in the shin.
Kellas went and bought five bottles of Californian red wine. The woman behind the counter did not seem like an arsehole. She was polite and did not ask if he was having a party. He bought some bags of nachos and jars of dip and lugged the goods back to the room in two carrier bags. He wanted to drink with Astrid, but the weight of the bags and the clinking of the bottles as he climbed the stairs bent his spirit.
It was dark. A row of lamps lit the terrace, one outside each room, and Kellas could see light spilling out through the glass doors of the room they had rented. On the far side of the marsh, beyond the trees, the beam of a lighthouse swept the wainscot of the world. Astrid was sitting on the sofa where he had left her, watching the Cartoon Network and turning a chrome-plated corkscrew over in her hands. There were two plastic tumblers on the table. Astrid got up, kissed him on the mouth, stroked his side and began opening one of the bottles while Kellas took the others out of the bag and put them in a line on the table. He asked if she minded him switching off the TV and she shook her head. She handed him a full glass of wine, clicked glasses, welcomed him to Chincoteague, and took a swallow. They sat down with the bottle on the floor between their feet.
‘Can I stay with you?’ asked Kellas.
‘How would you live?’
‘I have to call my old editors. They don’t take people back easily but they might take me for the war. They spent a lot of money to train me.’
‘The new war.’
‘Yes, the new war. What else can I do? I’m in debt, badly in debt. I’m not much of a hunter. Perhaps you’ll teach me.’
‘I hunt by myself.’
Kellas ran his hand over Astrid’s shoulder. ‘I want to see your skin again. I love your skin,’ he said.
‘Love!’
‘That was quite a jump you made out of that helicopter, for a pregnant lady. Must have been six feet.’
‘No way was it six feet! It didn’t hurt. It was a ride for the kid.’
‘So you left later.’
‘Much later.’
‘When?’
‘June.’
‘Naomi was born in Afghanistan?’
‘Happens every day.’
‘And now you’re glad to see me.’
‘I don’t recall telling you that.’ Astrid hid her grin behind her glass. She’d taken off her boots. She brought her knees up to her chest and put her feet onto the sofa in front of her.
‘Do you remember that day, when you jumped out?’
‘Sure. I remember us all screaming at the guy who wouldn’t let our car leave the guesthouse until we’d given him ten bucks.’
‘I remember you turning up at the guesthouse just when the helicopter came in to land.’
‘I remember you screaming “We’ll kill you!”’
‘Yeah.’ Kellas blushed and looked into his wine.
‘I thought it was funny, you saying “We’ll kill you.” Not “I’ll kill you.” You were issuing him with a death sentence on behalf of the whole group.’
‘I don’t think he was worried,’ said Kellas, laughing.
‘No,’ said Astrid. She was laughing too. ‘It was that healed-up bullet wound in his cheek, from where he’d been shot right through the face and survived. That’s what made me think he wasn’t worried about your death threat. And then we gave him his money and got into the helicopter and you said “Next stop, the bar, Hotel Tajikistan.”’
‘Was I really screaming?’ said Kellas. ‘Not shouting? Was that why you left? Me having one of my fits?’
‘You’ll work it out,’ said Astrid, draining her glass and refilling them both. ‘I’d rather be judged by what I do than what I say I do.’
‘I was glad to see you. I asked after you all over Kabul and Mazari-Sharif. Nobody knew where you were. Until I met an MSF woman at the Intercontinental who said she’d seen you in Bamiyan, I was beginning to think you were dead or gone home. You vanished after we killed those guys in the truck.’
‘We didn’t kill them. That’s your vanity again.’ The expression in Astrid’s eyes was so intense, and made Kellas feel so much a part of the world, that for a moment he experienced an ecstatic sense of discovery, as if he had found that a thing he had always known of and always wanted had, in fact, belonged to him all along, and all he had lacked was the words with which to claim it. ‘We didn’t kill them,’ said Astrid again. ‘We had a hand in it, that’s all, a small part. Did you write about it for your paper?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I was ashamed. I didn’t want people to think badly of me. Besides, how could I make it true? If I’d told the whole story, it would have had no place in a newspaper. I would have had to write about why I behaved the way I did. I would’ve had to write that I was influenced by love.’
‘Don’t say that!’
‘Why not?’
‘I knew you were taking it too seriously. I knew you were going to try and use it as a blood bond between us.’
‘How could I not take it seriously when two men burn to death in front of me?’
‘I know what happened. I know I did wrong. I’m carrying it with me. But it’s my burden, Adam, not ours. What you care about most isn’t those two guys dying. What you care about is that it happened while the two of us were there after we’d spent the night together and you figure the worse that happened, the closer it made us.’
‘No. It wasn’t like that.’
‘I know you lied to me when you said you wanted to fuck me. I know you wanted something more from me. You wanted the lovething. Everybody wants that. Everybody thinks everybody has it, so everybody wants to have it. Reckon they’re entitled. Everybody wants love so badly that whatever they get, love is what they call it. It’s the new religion. Love is God.’
‘You’re not right about the truck,’ said Kellas doggedly. ‘It mattered to me.’
‘What did you do about it?’
‘I went looking for the families of the drivers.’ He had to repeat it for Astrid, who didn’t understand at first. When he said it a second time she leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. She went to open another bottle of wine. Kellas got up and went to the bedroom with his glass. He propped up the pillows at the head of the bed and sat down with his back against them. After a moment Astrid came through with the second bottle and sat down beside him. Kellas put his arm around her and she leaned her head against him while he told her about the weeks he had spent without her in Afghanistan, after Bagram. He could see the two of them reflected in the drab green square of the switched-off TV on the chest of drawers at the end of the bed. Once, while he was talking, he saw Astrid look up at him, when she didn’t realise he could see.
After a time Astrid slipped out of Kellas’s arm and sat up. They had opened the third bottle of wine.
‘Take off your jeans,’ said Kellas.
Astrid rolled off the bed, unbuckled her belt and pulled off her jeans. Kellas took off his jeans and socks. Astrid laughed when she saw he wasn’t wearing any underpants. Like in a porn film, she said, as she sat down beside him.
‘I did lie to you,’ said Kellas. ‘I was in love with you then. I’m in love with you now. That’s why I came.’
‘When I met you in Afghanistan, you talked
as if you didn’t believe one person could ever know another,’ said Astrid. ‘When we were heading up to the Italian hospital, you sounded like a man denying the possibility of love. You can see why I’m surprised at you turning up out of nowhere now, saying you love me. Back then you sounded like a man who’d been hurt and disappointed, and learned something. Now you sound like a teenager. The man seemed like someone I could trust. I’m not sure about this new guy.’
‘I was wrong,’ said Kellas. ‘I’d forgotten there were other ways to know someone apart from watching, touching and listening.’
‘Sure. You can just invent them. Is that what you’re doing now? Inventing me?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Making a nice story out of me?’
‘No!’
‘There’s a third person here, Adam,’ Astrid said. ‘There’s some weird amalgam of what you imagine I am and what you imagine you are lying in the bed between us, and you’re too interested in that creature. We can’t be that. Besides, I told you. I like to be with you, in most ways, except that way. That love-way, whatever it is.’ Astrid drew up her knees and folded her arms across her chest. She pressed herself more closely against Kellas. ‘My mother was obsessed with the idea that she couldn’t be close enough to me, or that I should be closer to her. She wanted to be alone but she wanted to be alone with some other identity, a twin, a shadow, a reflection. A satellite. That was her idea. She told me once that her soul was too big to fit inside one person. She said she had a fat soul.’
Kellas laughed.
‘Yeah, it was funny. She was funny. But she was scary, too. The thing she wanted to make us closer – sometimes it was love and sometimes it was death. A couple of times she tried to kill herself while I was there. Once she chugged down a bunch of pills when I was in the bath and she was standing by the washstand. Another time she cut her wrists in the kitchen. We were talking across the table while she was chopping carrots and she just looked at me and ran the knife over her wrist. It was heavy and sharp and the weight of it cut into her without her needing to press much. I was twelve then. I often wondered about the phrase that suicide was a cry for help. When I was a kid I used to think it meant it was a summons to children to go help their mothers kill themselves. She always wanted to involve me in her activities. A mother-daughter thing. She got confused, I think. Death or love, it was the same. They both seemed like refuges and it seemed natural to her to have me with her in them.’
‘Involve you in her activities? Like death.’
‘I know it sounds crazy. I didn’t want to go with her!’
‘No.’
‘I can move towards something, but I don’t want to get there. I don’t want to get stuck. It feels too much like dying.’
‘It’s OK, Astrid.’
‘But that’s where I grew up, you know? A family with one member who was always just about to leave, just about to go to a place she shouldn’t go, and where I shouldn’t follow her. It was like living in a house with an extra door. There’s the front door, and the door onto the yard, and the door to the attic, and there’s the door that leads to dying. And none of the doors are ever locked.’ She looked at Kellas. ‘I never wanted to die, Adam. And my Dad didn’t, either, he just went quietly in his sleep; and my brother, he doesn’t want to die. But if you grow up in a house like that, with an extra door to dying – it’s your home. That’s what seems familiar.’
They lay there in silence, listening to each other’s breathing.
Kellas kissed her and whispered: ‘Would you believe me if I said that touching you there ever so gently, as gently as that, while I look into your eyes, made me happier than anything?’
‘Maybe. Do it some more and I’ll be sure.’
A small part of Kellas wondered if it would be better not to have sex with Astrid now, when they were both tipsy, in the aftersound of her memories. That, if he refrained, it might prove something. But he wanted to, and so did she, and they did. Pleasures were not excused from evolution. No human pleasure would have survived that didn’t promise comfort far beyond its own consummation.
12
Behind the hangover when Kellas woke up there was a fear that for a few moments he kept at a distance, unnamed. When he opened his eyes he saw the fan hanging from the ceiling. It floated there, somewhat darker than the dark, like a giant asterisk. Kellas picked up a glass of water standing on the shelf by the bed. He drained it and felt better but his heart was still kicking against his ribs, like a man having a fit in a cell too small for him to lie down in. Astrid was not beside him. She was not in the room. He should get up and look for her, but he didn’t want to. He was afraid. He heard sounds from the other side of the bedroom door. Wood scraping against wood, and a creaking. He should go and see what it was, but he didn’t want to. Reluctantly he switched on the bedside light. He counted the empty bottles in the room. There were three, and another empty next door. Kellas was sure he hadn’t drunk more than one and a half. Astrid’s boots were still on the floor. She was close.
He was as prey as anyone to the fears that crowd in on men and women in the small hours of the morning, yet there was a sharpedged, granite weight to the thought that was forming in his head now. The mind drew patterns from isolated circumstances, coincidences and suspicions. This pattern was heavy. It was real. He could blink and take deep breaths and make the bedside lamp come on but the fear persisted.
Astrid was an alcoholic.
Hard as he rejected it, hard as he tried to persuade himself that the darkness was to blame, the pattern insisted on its reality. That Astrid was an alcoholic who was trying hard, for herself and because she was a mother, not to be an alcoholic any more. Who lived on an island and had, as Bastian tried to tell him, submitted herself to the rule of a warden because of her weaknesses. That was his word. An island, come to think of it, with a limited number of bars and liquor outlets, from where it would be easy to get yourself barred, across the board, voluntarily or otherwise. Assholes. An island, for that matter, with no public transport, but where Astrid didn’t have a car and didn’t drive. Why would she do that unless her licence had been taken away?
The recovering alcoholic’s fear of the binge. Had there been binges? What a fine idea it must have seemed when Astrid missed her period after 9/11 and found she was pregnant. To cover the great story of her generation for her magazine, and at the same time to protect her unborn child from her mother’s temptations, in a Muslim country, where alcohol was forbidden. A place in which, as Astrid had told him, her affliction did not flourish. She flew into Dushanbe and checked into the Hotel Tajikistan. She’d binged there. That was her state when he’d met her in Faizabad, throwing up into the gorge: hung over. Of course there was booze in Afghanistan, a hardcore drunk with dollars could easily find what they needed, but Astrid was fighting it, and the child inside her was an ally of her will. She’d left Kellas twice. What did that have to do with alcohol? Nothing, nothing at all. Except that the first time, after crossing the Anjoman pass, had been when she realised he was carrying a litre of whisky, and the second, in the helicopter, when he had said to her ‘Next stop, the bar, Hotel Tajikistan.’ And she had stayed in Afghanistan.
Kellas got up, put on his clothes and switched on the main light. Standing in the ordinary brightness the pattern seemed less heavy and inevitable. Ridiculous man! Astrid liked a drink. One of the reasons the alcoholic theory was absurd was that it would make him, Kellas, the enemy, a serpent. Not winning her from Bastian for himself. Stealing her from Bastian and Naomi and delivering her to the sauce. Even more topsy-turvily, the cold, hostile Astrid who had greeted him when he arrived would be the good Astrid, and the laughing, affectionate Astrid of the past few hours would be the weak, beaten, greedy one. No, that would not be reasonable. It would be the same as imagining that in all Astrid’s yearning, the hunting of the deer and sexual ecstasy, the pursuit of knowledge in humankind’s wild places and of the mystery in the darkness, the kernel of her desires, was a glass
of diluted ethanol.
He went into the sitting room. The curtain was drawn across the glass on the terrace side. All the lights were on and the room was chilly. The fourth empty bottle was where they had left it. The fifth bottle wasn’t there. The snacks he had bought sat unopened in their bright packaging on the table. It was midnight. He’d slept for many hours. He opened the door of the bathroom, afraid and hoping. Astrid wasn’t there. He heard the curtain flapping and came out of the bathroom. It was the wind; the sliding door must be wide open. Kellas went over and jerked the curtain aside.
Astrid was sitting on the balustrade with her back to the marsh, her bare feet just grazing the terrace as she swayed lightly. Her head was hanging forward. He couldn’t see her face, only the top of her head. Her left arm hung down limp, as if dislocated. Her right hand clutched a plastic tumbler which she had put down on the parapet of the balustrade but which had toppled onto its side. Judging by the small dark spot that had sunk into the wood at the lip of the tumbler, it had been almost empty. The fifth bottle, which was empty, stood between the chairs.
Kellas stood in the doorway, watching her. If he spoke, she might wake up suddenly and fall. He could hear the rough sound of her breathing. She listed, inhaled sharply, belched and muttered something. Kellas took two steps forward and put his hands firmly on her shoulders. Astrid’s head shot up and he was looking into her face and seeing that his fear was true.
She was both alive and dead. There was a crusty tidemark of black wine remnants running across her lips and her nose and eyes were red. There was a bruise on her left cheekbone. She was awake yet operating in the secondary consciousness of someone who’d become habituated to huge infusions of alcohol. Kellas had seen them, the forms of men and women who came up to him in pubs at eight in the evening, when they had been drinking since morning. At first they seemed sober, merely grey and red and thoughtful in their speech, until he realised they were repeating the same sentences over and over, and all that was left of them was motor function and senses enough to communicate their simple needs to bar staff and cab drivers. Really they were three-quarters dead and Kellas had always been chilled by the gradual awareness that he was talking to the container of a familiar human being when the human was not present. The cold, lizardish emptiness of the eyes was not easy to forget even once the human returned and now he was looking into Astrid’s eyes and they were like that. He had told the woman through these eyes that he loved her and the eyes were watching him now but the woman was not there.
