by James Meek
Sophie shook her head. ‘You’ve never even been there. You don’t know what it’s like.’
‘Here’s the difference,’ said Kellas. ‘My imaginary Baghdad doesn’t require anything of the Iraqis, only of me.’
‘It requires that they don’t kill you.’
‘I should be making a move,’ said Kellas. Fergus and Jack stopped chopping, glanced round, looked at each other, then resumed their work.
‘Stay,’ said Sophie.
‘To be punished or to be forgiven?’
‘For God’s sake!’ said Sophie, putting her hands on his shoulders and shaking him. ‘Just to be here!’
Angela came in, followed by M’Gurgan. They were shouting at each other, and Sophie joined in. The matter was that, if it was a choice between the two, M’Gurgan would rather Angela had bought drugs than a tattoo, but a tattoo was what she’d bought; M’Gurgan’s anger was intensified because the tattoo was in such an intimate place that Angela refused to show him what she’d got for his money.
Carrie put her head round the door, looked at the three people arguing and the two boys hacking away with their knives, winked at Kellas and went upstairs. Kellas smiled at her but she’d already gone. She looked like her mother. The thin black line all round her eyes and the pale lips. But then Sophie was not Carrie’s mother, was she? The words flowed out of the mouths of M’Gurgan and Angela and Sophie. Tomorrow they would not remember the truth of all that spiky eloquence. They would not remember even in a couple of hours. Kellas stood up. Something would remain, a contour without meaning by itself, but it would not be by itself. A river was to be known by its course, not by tasting each drop which flowed past as you walked its banks. After checking with the boys, Kellas began with great care to lay the table for dinner.
March 2003
15
The silver Tahoe carrying Rafael, Zac and Yehia stopped up ahead. Three of the doors opened at once and the men got out and walked slowly back towards Kellas and Astrid’s Mitsubishi. Rafael’s eyes were narrowed against the light and his head was bent forward. He wanted to confer about where they should go next and he had many other things on his mind. He spent hours during the day and night on his Thuraya, conferring with his colleagues around the theatre and in America. He didn’t sleep much.
Their two cars had stopped just short of a viaduct, which led over a wadi and, so far as they could tell, on towards Basra. The road was a straight, well-made line of tarmacadam, black against the granular weed-sown churn of the desert. There were no other vehicles on the road. There were no people or buildings and there was no wind or sound. Kellas switched off the engine and he and Astrid got out. The five of them stood close together, facing inwards, each of them turning again and again to search the horizon for any movement or smoke, except for Yehia, who searched the faces of the other four. Kellas felt the heat of the sun on his back. He’d taken off his flak. He was the only one still wearing his helmet. To the south, from where they had come, he saw two Marine gunships, far enough away that their rotors couldn’t be heard and only just recognisable by their ashy outlines, scorched flakes blown out of a distant fire. After a few seconds they moved out of sight.
Yehia and Zac smoked. Rafael was afraid that Basra would fall and he would miss it. Kellas wanted to be there, too, to see the British tanks trundle squeaking down the main street, the commanders grinning under their black berets, teeth bright in sunburned faces, with the crowds ten deep and cheering, flowers bouncing off the tank armour, the girls in their spring dresses scrambling up onto the turrets to kiss the soldiers and the man in the white suit proclaiming liberty. It was easy to imagine because it was not really imagining, but remembering; and not even remembering something he had seen, but remembering newsreel clips of British tanks liberating Europe in 1944, except for the man in the white suit, who was from Casablanca. The girls didn’t wear spring dresses here, or kiss strangers; and where would they get flowers?
Astrid had a map. She pointed to where she thought they were. Basra was only twenty miles away.
Rafael shifted his weight from foot to foot, spun the Thuraya in his hand, with its aerial up, like a baton, and invoked shit. ‘I don’t know. I can see this on the front page of the Post tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I need the fucking dateline.’
‘This is a beautiful road,’ said Kellas. ‘It leads straight to Basra. There are fifty thousand British and American troops back there who want to take Basra. And yet we’re the only people on this road.’
‘It sounds to me like it’s over,’ said Zac. ‘If you believe the BBC, the American armour’s halfway to Baghdad already.’
‘They only crossed the start line the night before last,’ said Kellas.
‘Let’s get closer to Basra,’ said Astrid. ‘We’ll take it carefully. Do it like this, move, stop, surveill, move.’
‘Carrying two hundred litres of fuel in a sports-utility vehicle in these parts can never be careful,’ said Kellas. They stopped talking, looked, listened and fidgeted.
‘Hear that?’ said Kellas.
‘Yeah, sounds like a skylark, doesn’t it?’
‘We shouldn’t be able to hear a sound like that in the space between two armies. It’s a bad sign.’
‘Ah, if the Iraqis were going to put up a fight, they’d have done it by now.’
‘At this moment, they’re the ones I’m less concerned about,’ said Kellas. ‘Didn’t you notice what that Marine told us an hour ago? A bit of a problem around Zubair, he said.’
‘That’s Zubair.’
‘He also talked about “free-fire zones”.’
They all looked up. The sky was clear and silent, apart from the larksong.
‘We’ve got the orange panels on the vehicles,’ said Rafael, a little sulky now.
‘What is this, the new Ghost Dance?’ said Kellas, and laughed. ‘Bullets bounce off?’ His voice was high and he thought he sounded as if he was afraid. He was, and wished it didn’t bother him that the others might think it. He asked Yehia, who shrugged. He would go where Zac and Rafael went. They were paying him and he was the only interpreter.
‘Well, all those in favour of driving on,’ said Rafael. Everyone except Kellas raised their hands.
‘I could go with them, and you could drive back,’ said Astrid to Kellas.
Kellas watched her looking at him, with the apparent indifference which, he had learned, did not mean that she did not care, rather that she gave great weight to the responsibility of others for their own fortune.
‘I’d rather you stuck with me, of course,’ she said.
Since she’d joined him in Kuwait a few days earlier, he had found himself starting to cherish his ignorance of her inner nature. Yet it seemed so unlikely that he had learned patience. It seemed unlikely that he had learned to apprehend time, rather than the events and words of which time was made. He believed what Astrid had told him once, that you could not change, except by becoming more like you really are. Had he learned to see people and countries in time, or had it always been in him to do so? He unclipped the helmet strap, took it off, and ran his fingers through his hair. In the past, in situations like this, he had sometimes found himself the boldest one. Those times it had been the ones with children and dear partners who’d been more cautious. This group had five children, two wives and a partner between them. Yehia alone had a wife and three children in Beirut. Their recklessness was a sign of the scale and lavish allure of this enterprise.
‘Four to one,’ he said. He struck his helmet with his knuckles three times and put it back on. ‘It’s fine. Let’s go. There, we brought democracy to Iraq, and it didn’t hurt at all.’
As they dispersed to their cars, Kellas called out that it was his and Astrid’s turn to drive in front. Kellas drove the Mitsubishi up onto the viaduct and in the mirror he saw the Tahoe pull in behind. Astrid was looking straight ahead. She felt he was watching her and smiled at him.
‘Did we bully you?’ she said.
‘Say someth
ing more fine,’ said Kellas. ‘I want to hear something that matters. I want to hear an old story. I hate the emptiness of this road. Are the hairs on the back of your neck sticking up?’
‘I like it when they do that. Usually it’s going into the woods at night that gives me that feeling. Do you know the story of Artemis and Actaeon?’
Astrid began to tell the story. Kellas put his hand in hers, and listened to the tale of how the goddess turned a huntsman who angered her into a stag, and how he was killed by his own dogs. After a while, in the silence of the desert, he felt his consciousness dividing; he was still Adam Kellas at the wheel of the car, watching the road ahead, and at the same time he was another, estranged version of himself, watching Kellas and Astrid as they drove. They looked peaceful and thoughtful, half-kind, half hungry, the sort of fortunate people in whom hope and defeat are still in balance –although you cannot tell, of course, in a moment’s watching. Perhaps they were dreaming a little. Gradually the watcher drew back, until Kellas and Astrid could no longer be distinguished as individuals; they were two dark, generic figures in the car. The watcher continued to extend his distance. The two cars became smaller and smaller, shrinking into the landscape, and seemed to move more and more slowly, until in the black-and-white glow of his reticulated screen the watcher saw nothing but two dark spots, crawling like lice through the desert along the empty road.
Also by James Meek
The People’s Act of Love (2005)
The Museum of Doubt (2000)
Drivetime (1995)
Last Orders (1992)
Mcfarlane Boils the Sea (1989)
Copyright
We Are Now Beginning Our Descent
© 2008 by James Meek. All rights reserved.
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EPub Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40003-9
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Meek, James, 1962–
We are now beginning our descent / James Meek.
ISBN 978-0-00-200856-3
I. Title.
PR6063.E445W4 2008 823’.914 C2008-900839-1
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