We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

by James Meek

  Kellas took the mobile phone out of his pocket, switched it on and sat down on a bleached fragment of tree trunk. He placed the phone on the sand a short distance away and waited. The phone began to chirrup with the messages he had been sent over the preceding three days. It went on for several minutes. When the phone became quiet Kellas picked it up and dialled the number of his old newspaper. He talked to different editors for half an hour, then waited for them to call him back. They couldn’t give him his old job; couldn’t give him any job. All they could do was offer him a short contract to cover the invasion of Iraq, which they anticipated would be in the spring. Kellas agreed, with conditions, and after balking and consulting, they accepted.

  Kellas switched the phone off and put it away. He walked back. Others had begun to arrive at the beach. A woman walked a red setter and two anglers had pulled plastic handcarts close to the water’s edge and were setting up rods in the sand. Kellas crossed the dunes and returned to the road. After walking a mile he saw Astrid riding towards him on her bicycle. She cycled up and stopped with one foot on the ground and one foot on the pedals. They greeted each other. Kellas took his hands out of his pockets, then put them back.

  Astrid was pale and had blue patches under her eyes. Otherwise she was restored. The breeze gusted and blew her hair into her eyes and she shook it clear. She had returned from the netherworld where the souls of the dead drunk reside in the hours of their stupor. In the darkness of the marsh it had seemed certain to Kellas that the alcoholic crust of this woman was the actual Astrid, and that what he thought he loved was, like his memory of the sixteen-year-old Sophie, a spirit of his own callow summoning, never more than lightly present in Astrid. Now, in the morning, seeing her in front of him, proud and nervous, it was difficult to see her alcoholism as anything other than a recurring wound which would open and bleed unpredictably, but just as surely heal again. That the Astrid he had loved was real, yet not a fully able human; if any were fully able. Even though he had failed her terribly, a feeling of lightness came over him. The terms had changed. It was no longer a question of whether he was looking at an alcoholic disguised as Astrid, or Astrid carrying a drinker’s scars. Now the question could only be who Kellas was – the Kellas who had been repelled by the drunken Astrid, or the Kellas who could barely see the marks that the drinking had made in the sober woman of Wednesday; or a Kellas who understood that both Astrid and himself were to be perceived not as the beasts and beauties of this or that moment, but as the long, twisting shapes they carved in time as they flowed through it.

  ‘A friend of ours is driving over to Baltimore later,’ said Astrid. ‘He can drop you off at the airport. There’s a flight to London tonight. Bastian looked it up on the Internet.’

  Kellas nodded. He asked Astrid how she felt.

  ‘Hung over.’

  ‘Do you remember?’

  Astrid looked down and fidgeted with her nails. She met Kellas’s eyes for a moment and turned quickly away, looking out to the left and the right as if she were facing a panel of interrogators. She said, in a voice so quiet he could hardly hear it: ‘A partridge fallen among chickens.’ She stepped off the bicycle and let it crash onto the road and Kellas put his arms around her. He felt a tear fall from her face into the collar of his coat and trickle down his back. She stepped away and wiped her eyes.

  ‘I spoke to The Citizen,’ said Kellas. ‘They’re taking me back for the war.’

  Astrid smiled, still a little teary-eyed. ‘So now you’ve got a stake in it happening.’

  ‘I guess,’ said Kellas. He hadn’t thought of it that way. ‘It’s settled, isn’t it? Whatever they say.’

  ‘It’s strange how we all know that, and yet we don’t do anything about it when they tell us they haven’t made up their minds.’ Astrid stuck her hands in her pockets, hunched her shoulders and traced an arc on the road with her foot. ‘What’s going to happen, do you think?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Kellas. ‘But I’m trying not to be dependent on the outcome.’ He told Astrid that The Citizen had agreed to send him on an intensive Arabic course when he got back to London. He’d take a house in Baghdad after the invasion, once things had quietened down. Somewhere close to the river. He would live as an exile, not trying to be Iraqi, not trying to live uncomfortably, far from it. He would be Adam Kellas there. He would deepen his knowledge of the language and the arts and recipes of the place. At first he’d make a living by writing a weekly column, then, after a year, when British readers had lost interest in Iraq, he’d write a book and try to find work in Baghdad University as a teacher. Perhaps they would be able to make use of him. He would get up early, sleep in the afternoon and listen to the stories of old men in coffee shops in the evening. Where an entire quarter of middle-class Scottish atheists might cause offence, a single one resident in their midst would give him the shield of eccentricity. Maybe he’d get to be a messenger – no more, not an advocate, not an emissary or intermediary, only a messenger – between the world he was born into and the world where he lived.

  ‘What are you going to do for women?’ asked Astrid.

  ‘I’ll get by.’

  ‘Your plan stinks. You can say it but you won’t get to live it.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Kellas patiently. ‘I’m getting away from that, from the misimagining. I’m going to get away from the idealising and the demonising. I’m not going to live like them and I’m not going to change. I’m going to be there as the man that I am.’

  ‘Your not-idealising’s just another kind of idealising,’ said Astrid. ‘You think you’re getting past the fantasies of our crusaders and the apocalypses of our doom-mongers, that you’ve got real. Well, I’ll tell you this for free, if you reckon we’ve misimagined Iraq, it’s nothing to how Iraq misimagines us.’

  ‘But that’s exactly why I’m going to live in Baghdad. After the invasion.’

  Astrid shook her head. She glanced at Kellas from under her fringe, drew in breath and opened her mouth to speak, then changed her mind. With her mouth still held slightly open, she turned sunwards to consider, and the light lit up her face.

  ‘Where are you starting from?’ she asked.

  ‘Kuwait.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘They’re pretty strict about booze there.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘We’re not friends, are we?’ said Kellas.

  ‘Never had a friend like you, anyway.’

  ‘Or lovers.’

  ‘Not as would come out ahead in a crash test.’

  ‘We’re not looking for each other. I was looking for you but unfortunately I found you.’

  ‘I wasn’t asking to be found.’

  ‘So I guess we’re over.’

  ‘Paths cross,’ said Astrid.

  ‘Leaving it to chance.’

  ‘Yeah. But it could happen that I bend my path a little.’

  Kellas raised his eyebrows. ‘What about Naomi?’ he said.

  ‘It would have been worse for me if my mother hadn’t been around when I was a kid,’ said Astrid. ‘But I might have been better off if she’d spent more time away. The sadness built up in her when she stayed in one place. I could feel it building up in her and her wanting everyone around her to share the load.’

  ‘And Bastian?’

  ‘He knows better than to think he can hold me close by being good to me. He knows I’ll come back.’

  A passing car heading for the beach hooted at Astrid and she waved. ‘Come on, we should go back to the house,’ she said. ‘Mount up.’

  The two of them managed to perch on the saddle. Astrid pedalled and Kellas held on as best he could. It was uncomfortable and they wobbled fiercely as they traversed a cycle path that led through the woods back to the causeway. Several times Kellas yelled out as Astrid almost lost control and he felt himself slipping. By the time they reached the causeway, it was easier, and as they coasted down off the causeway’s camber, Astrid whooped and Kellas laughed. When they
reached the flat, Astrid set to pedalling again and Kellas looked down to watch the shadow they were casting. It was a wide creature. It must have had a fat soul. But for a few seconds their shadow did look like two people merged into one, a single being racing across the reeds.

  14

  Kellas flew into Heathrow the next morning before first light and took the Tube to Bow. He showered, put on clean clothes and made coffee. The skimmed milk he had bought on Sunday was still drinkable and the flat had not had time to acquire the odour of neglect. Just before he went out, the landline phone rang. He looked at it, hesitated, and left without answering. It was the middle of rush hour when he took the Tube west, standing with his back hard against the door and his neck bent close enough to the right cheek of an office worker to count each individual grain of powder on the small mole on her jaw. He tried to switch to the Northern Line at Moorgate but there was a suicide under a train at Angel and the system was snarled. He went up to the street. The pavements and crossings teemed with black coats and hungry strides, springing through the drizzle to the morning log-on. He bought a copy of The Citizen and boarded the 205 bus. He climbed to the upper deck and found a seat next to a woman hunched over a tiny book with leather covers and small print in an unfamiliar alphabet. She was moving her lips silently as she read, and rocking backwards and forwards. The windows were steamed up. Some of the passengers cleared circles in the condensation with their hands and some did not, but looked through the windows anyway, as if the diffused grey-blue light alone was narrative enough.

  Kellas went through the sports pages first. He liked to read the placings in obscure sports he would never see or take part in; canoeing, shinty, women’s cricket. The fact that so many people could devote so much time, effort and passion to competing according to an arbitrary set of rules gave hope to the unbelievers. Then the obituaries, the letters, the columnists and the news. Three-quarters of the US military’s women met the criteria for eating disorders. Michael Caine had persuaded the producers to release the film version of The Quiet American, after they held back for fear it would look unpatriotic after 9/11. The White House scorned the United Nations for saying the Iraqis were cooperating with their inspectors. Several hundred British officers were going to Qatar to take part in an American wargame, but the Ministry of Defence said it had nothing to do with Iraq. Forty-seven per cent of Britons said Saddam Hussein should be removed by force, and forty-seven per cent of Britons said he shouldn’t be. A Sky Movies critic was quoted as saying after a preview that the director of The Two Towers, the second instalment of The Lord of the Rings, ‘captures some of the most ferocious battle scenes ever put on film and puts his camera right in among the blood and guts’.

  The bus crested Angel, descended Pentonville Road and negotiated the cones and temporary concrete dividers around King’s Cross. Only twenty years earlier people of Kellas’s age had wondered whether, should they get as far as the twenty-first century, it would be to write by the light of rags torn from the bodies of the dead, on scavenged paper, with precious pens, leaving crumbs of their own petrifying flesh across the page to be brushed away. Instead the lights had only become brighter, and the diversions more wonderful. The invasion he’d agreed to take part in had been scripted for an audience that knew as much about orcs and Sauron as it did about Iraqis and Saddam; yet for his own country, it was more. Everywhere this morning he saw new tokens of public wealth breaking through, a new European rail terminal emerging at St Pancras, a new hospital in a skyscraper rising above Euston, the cranes circling the old Wembley Stadium in preparation for its demolition and the construction of a new one at a sumptuous price. As his train left the city, one of the new, faster trains which would replace it shimmered past, like an emissary from the year 2000, which, although it was now in the past, Kellas still nostalgically thought of as the future. An unnecessary war where the only victims were volunteers or foreigners was the last luxury of a society that could not accept it had more money than it knew how to console itself with. It was an attempt to buy seriousness with other people’s blood; to taste the words of high tragedy in your mouth, and savour your own doom and hubris, yet skip aside at the last minute and let a spear-carrier take the knife your flaws had summoned for you.

  Kellas was impatient for it to begin.

  His train pushed north like a scraper stripping the rainclouds off the wet render of the Midlands. The low-lying fields were flooded and the bellies of the livestock were splashed with dirt. One town merged into another, pylons daintily hitched their cables up out of the mire, no green field went unlooked on by a window; it spoke of the narrowness of the island. Kellas dozed. North of Preston the land began to be yanked and folded and the hills rose over the train, yellow and bare. They passed backpackers on the platform at Oxenholme. Closer to the track were pines and gorse and stone dykes and the motorway shadowing the trains through the Pennines. At Carlisle Kellas changed to a local train in a plum-and-custard livery which hummed more quickly than he remembered or wanted through the green flatlands around the Solway Firth, crossed the border and delivered him, in the middle of the afternoon, to Dumfries.

  He crossed the footbridge, came out of the station and turned left down the Lockerbie road. There was a stillness over the heavy red-stone terraces and bungalows, a blindness to their dark windows, which was, he knew, because almost all their residents were working or at school or watching afternoon TV but which he could not help sensing as a waiting for his arrival, like the stillness of the corridor and the waiting room leading to the place in which some final account would be delivered to him.

  Kellas approached the scruffy hedge around the M’Gurgans’ patch of front garden. He unlatched the waist-high gate of hooped iron rods. His hand was shaking. The gate opened with the rusty twonote mew he knew and he took the three paces to the door. He put his finger on the doorbell, the white plastic button in the black plastic box he was used to ringing carelessly, and looked to his right. A souvenir from a holiday long ago was sitting on the inside windowsill, between the window and the Venetian blinds: a painted red wooden fish with a hole running through the middle. For as long as he’d been coming to this house the fish had sat there, for no better reason than that nobody had felt inclined to move it. It was hard for Kellas to force himself to remember that he had already interfered with the course of the five people in this household. He had committed his deed, and whether he rang the bell or not, it couldn’t be undone.

  He pressed the button. He heard the inner door opening, the echo of the stiff handle in the tiled space of the porch, and then M’Gurgan was looking at him. From M’Gurgan’s hesitation, the quick flick of his eyes up and down from Kellas’s shoes back to his face, Kellas knew that the letter had arrived and that its contents had been discussed.

  The two men stood regarding each other in silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Kellas.

  ‘Your agent said you were in America,’ said M’Gurgan.

  ‘I got back this morning.’

  M’Gurgan turned and nodded his head for Kellas to follow. His silence rang of earlier fighting. He led the way to the kitchen. Past him Kellas could make out Sophie at the kitchen table, looking to see who it was. Her eyes were red. When she saw it was Kellas she folded her arms across her chest, looking straight ahead, and tipped her chair back on two legs. On the table were two mobiles, a dozen balls of scrunched-up paper tissues and the box they came from, a neat pile of the morning papers, which had not been read, a bottle of champagne and Kellas’s letter.

  ‘We got back this morning ourselves,’ said M’Gurgan.

  ‘Lots of mail waiting for us,’ said Sophie, not looking at either man. ‘Mostly junk mail but not all of it.’ Her voice was scratchy and it wavered.

  Kellas stood in the doorway. It seemed presumptuous to sit, or to take off his coat. M’Gurgan couldn’t sit down either. He stood by the sink, nervously clenching his hands and stretching his fingers, looking from Kellas to Sophie.

  Kel
las walked over and put his right hand on Sophie’s shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for what I did on Sunday and I’m sorry I wrote that letter.’

  ‘What use is sorry to me?’ said Sophie, looking up at him, her eyes beginning to glisten. ‘Tell me. I don’t even know which one of you I’m supposed to be angry with.’ She grabbed another tissue. ‘This one for shagging around, or this one for telling me about it? For fuck’s sake, get your hand off me and sit down. And take off your coat.’ Kellas did as he was told. He sat with a chair between him and Sophie. She turned to look at him. ‘Five hours ago I was sitting on a plane, worrying about you, wondering where you’d gone and what had happened to your mind. Why did you send me that letter? How did you think it was going to help me? How did you think it was going to help him? He’s your friend, isn’t he? I mean—’ Sophie sniffed, wiped her eyes and nose, and curled her hand around the tissue ‘—I know the answers, but I want to hear what you have to say. Come on.’ She smiled and the tears came again. ‘Come on.’

  Kellas bit his lips, considering.

  ‘Come on.’ Sophie raised her voice. ‘Tell me!’

  ‘Malice,’ said Kellas. ‘I was jealous of Pat and his book.’

  Sophie and M’Gurgan shouted ‘Oh!’ and turned their heads away at the same time. Sophie said he was a terrible liar and M’Gurgan laughed exactly the laugh Kellas had heard an old Jewish man who survived an atrocity laugh when he was describing a particularly absurd passage of murder.