Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Maps
Dedication
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
It’s 1994 and the former Yugoslavia is being torn apart. In England, a gang of good-hearted young people are about to set off in a Ford Transit van armed with several sacks of rice and a half-written play. A play which will light a beacon of peace across the Balkans and, very probably, stop the war.
Andrew would love to stop the war. He has one of the most comprehensively developed personal foreign policies of anyone working on a building site in the Greater Manchester area. He feels everyone should have a foreign policy, really. What sort of person doesn’t have a foreign policy? But what he’d like to do – maybe even more than stopping the war – is sleep with Penny, who he is pretty sure might be the love of his life.
But does Penny like him? Or does she love Simon, his rival, an irritatingly authentic Geordie poet? Or Shannon, the fierce, inspiring American leader of the troupe? Who exactly loves who? And what’s the safest way to make it out of a minefield should you accidentally wander into one? And what do you talk to a mercenary about? And is a bad thing really a bad thing if it maybe leads to a good thing?
It could all take a while to work out, as the gang cross Europe and head into the war zone.
About the Author
Jesse Armstrong is the co-creator and writer of the BAFTA Award-winning Peep Show, as well as Fresh Meat, Bad Sugar, Babylon and, with Chris Morris, Four Lions. He was also the co-writer of The Thick of It and the Oscar-nominated In the Loop, and wrote the Entire History of You for Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror.
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals is his first novel.
To my mother and father
Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals
Jesse Armstrong
Chapter 1
I WAS IN London, and I think every other person in the room was posh. So posh, in fact, they never used the word. ‘Posh’, I clocked quickly, because I’m a fast study, is a little too close to the knuckle. ‘Posh’, it turns out, is actually rather common. ‘Grand’ and ‘smart’ are the words the posh use to describe houses and people and parties that are very posh. And if at those parties the posh ever meet an outsider who questions, even obliquely, the distribution of wealth and privilege from which the non-posh are excluded, they get ever so gently nailed forever as ‘chippy’, and that’s a killer cobweb from which there is really no escape. Never be chippy around the posh. I got that fast too.
So, I was in a posh house in west London, and I could feel every single point at which my clothing was touching my body, and I couldn’t imagine what in the whole wide fucking world I could possibly say to anyone.
We were all there in a sitting room up on the first floor, which struck me as a very sophisticated floor for a sitting room. It suggested that anything, really, could go anywhere and only the anxious bourgeoisie would feel required to have their sitting-around rooms at ground level.
The rough cotton of my shirt collar was chafing particularly. Taking a look in the large mirror over the mantelpiece, yes, I thought – for this encounter with Penny’s family and close friends, for the Great Announcement, I had ended up choosing the sort of outfit a mother might pick for her seven-year-old to wear to a friend’s wedding. M&S ‘chino’ trousers; a shirt checked with brown-and-red stripes that its manufacturers presumably hoped implied some sort of relationship with the countryside, and what it might be slightly grandiose to describe as a ‘green sweater’.
Along the sides of the rectangular sitting room were sofas and comfortable chairs. A couple of low tables in the middle were stacked with champagne glasses. You could try to read the history of the rise and fall of the British Empire along the mantelshelf under the mirror: Indian jib jabs and silver candlesticks, Chinese pots and invites to American Embassy receptions. Underfoot, the rug over the carpet was red and Persian or similar, the pile so thick you felt a little unstable walking on it.
Actually, looking into the antique mirror, perhaps I looked more like a gawky cleric than a seven-year-old? The Doc Martens, poking out like a pair of regular-sized clown shoes, did very much give me the look of a once hip vicar who had undergone a crisis of faith and retired somewhere quiet to have a big think about everything.
Nearby, Penny’s parents and younger brother, Von, were talking about an acquaintance’s son who had been either promoted or mugged; it was hard for me to make out the concrete detail because I was preoccupied with trying not to fuck up the complicated manoeuvre I was engaged in: drinking from a glass. For some reason, taking a sip without chomping a bite out of the champagne flute like a loon or choking to death on the booze felt like it required all my powers of concentration. As her father moved round with the bottle, topping guests up, I was actively ‘planning’ my next swallow. But it turns out swallowing is one of those things where too much planning is counterproductive. I spluttered a little and looked down at a side table.
Because all the while, as I tensed up ready for the announcement, there was, lying there like a time bomb on the table, my own personal problem. The humdinger, the shame-maker: The Gift. Back in the bookshop, it had all seemed quite amusing, after – what? – seven tours around the shop. Everything else seemed a little gauche. I wanted something playful. Not something obvious from the offer piles by the door, nor something classic and suggestive of the exam room. Nothing, for God’s sake, from ‘Humour’. Something a little bit tasty. Something unexpected.
Well, none of them would be expecting this. I could confidently predict that. For there, buried three gifts down, asymmetrically wrapped and poorly taped, was a hardback copy of Elite Fighting Forces: Maximum Power – a survey of various paramilitary commando units from around the globe and, furthermore, some cross-section diagrammatics of their key equipment and weaponry. This was what I was giving to win the heart of the young woman I believed I loved.
Penny stood and offered round the room a bowl of the jagged, lead-heavy crisps they liked – so expensive and painful to eat. She stood a head taller than her adoptive mother and father. A Nubian queen transplanted, she regarded her folks, as they rustled their fingertips in the snack bowl, with what looked to me a disdain so ingrained no one dared notice it.
The number of people in the room felt perfectly judged to make it unclear whether it was necessary to verbally excuse myself for a visit to the toilet. Can you, I wondered, just walk out of a room here, or is that in fact incredibly rude? Where, after all, are you going? Are you coming back? Perhaps not. Perhaps you have been grossly o
ffended? Perhaps you’re trying to steal something? But similarly, surely you don’t normally, to everyone, state exactly where you’re going each time you leave a room? Or do you? Is that exactly what you do? In the end I reversed out like I was at Versailles, or might have been stabbed in the back, laying down an additionally extended plasticised grin as covering fire.
In the toilet I splashed water onto my face, seeking comfort in the sort of thing someone might do in a film, like knocking back a Scotch in a bar after getting fired in the opening scene.
Elite Fighting Forces. In the shop it felt so obviously wrong as to be rather hilarious; the shiny cover shot of an SAS man crouching ready to shoot was an amusing counterpoint to the Nobel laureates and prizewinners. But isolated from its shop-mates I was pretty sure Elite Fighting Forces was going to look not hilariously, but slightly psychotically, misjudged.
‘Gone to Ground?’ a very thin man said in a cartoon speech bubble up on the toilet wall, unaware of a fat man, also in red hunting garb, hiding on the other side of a hedge. ‘Gone to Ground?’ When had it been produced – 1790? 1870? 1987? Product of the English Social Signifier Wall Coverings Company.
Splash.
But why had fatty gone to ground? What was he hiding from? Was this the Cheers of its day? But now the layers had built up so you couldn’t see the joke? Presumably, fatty – like the fox – had gone to ground. But why? Why the fuck had fatty gone to ground? Was he looking for something? And then, as in the moments of mad allusive connection before sleep, for a beat it felt like the family – even fatty – knew I was hiding, and the cartoon was a rebuke to all the misplaced provincials who had wandered into the house over the years and found themselves going to ground in the downstairs loo.
I was looking at my champagne glass thinking how wrong it had been to bring it with me (as if I was in a rough pub and someone might spike my pint), when it suddenly struck me that the length of my absence had probably crossed the point that implied defecation. What a horrible thing to do. To come to another person’s house and then sneak away to a little room and do a huge shit.
I hurried to return, hoping to fit myself into a time frame that might simply have suggested a very long piss. But a spurt from the brass tap zoomed up the scalloped curve of the sink like an ambitious skateboarder and left my trousers looking urine-spattered. The solution, I decided, was to ensure the accident couldn’t be misinterpreted. I flicked extra droplets quite liberally all over the area below the waistband. This was an unambiguous overspill, I wanted my trousers to announce. Not a urine situation.
In the sitting room, Penny oohed and aahed at every new present as if the person who’d given it had divined the true desire of her secret heart. The swathe of damp across my lap went unmentioned but not unnoticed as she claimed a set of expensive French art pencils were exactly what she’d been hoping for, dealt with an incredibly thick Norman Mailer book by swearing she had nearly bought it herself, and gobbled up a piece of sheer silk, wrapping it around her head and fingering the fabric with delight.
As she turned my package in her hands, I held for a moment a hope that God or elves might mean Elite Fighting Forces was a dream and beneath the wrapping would be a suitable book. But the truth was no book that shape and size could be suitable. A4 like a football annual. But thin. So cheaply, depressingly thin. As if even the people knocking out this man-crap had given up halfway through.
‘Oh – wow. Thank you. Thank you, Andrew, so much!’ she said, looking at it with a moment’s hesitation.
‘Yeah, it’s supposed to be, I thought . . .’
‘It’s great!’
‘It’s just – stupid.’
‘No, I’d like to know more about . . . Fighting Forces.’
And before I could interject, she took this treasure for a tour of the room. I wanted to make a public explanation, but an essay, maybe even a set of officially written histories, like those produced after the Second World War by each arm of the military, something like that would be needed to explain the cultural and economic factors that had led to this gift. Simon, my rival, and Cally, her best friend, gathered with an older couple in deliciously soft cashmere jumpers to take a careful look at Elite Fighting Forces. The last time anyone outside of an Oxfam shop would open its covers.
‘It was supposed to be sort of – funny,’ I said to her father.
‘It’s incredibly kind of you. Very nice of you to come. I’m Kenneth, wonderful to meet you.’ The father extended his hand warmly. Admittedly, it didn’t have quite the same warm effect as when we had been introduced standing in pretty much the same spot, in the same room, twenty-four hours earlier. But it was still nice. After all, I had the feeling that I was so insubstantial in Kenneth’s estimation that up to eighteen or twenty visits might be necessary before I became fully visible. Up until then I would be a ghost who, if treated civilly and offered enough expensive crisps, might eventually fuck off. Kenneth looked like he’d met enough people now; he was basically full.
‘And how do you know Penny?’ he asked.
‘From Manchester.’
‘Ah. Yes. And what were you reading?’
‘Oh, I wasn’t at the university, actually.’
‘Right?’
‘I’m actually a construction worker,’ I said. (‘Like you might find in an American storybook or a pornographic video,’ I didn’t say.)
‘Oh, right.’
‘Yeah. I was thinking about going to university, but I’m sort of –’
‘No, absolutely,’ he said.
If our conversation was a cat, I had the feeling about now he’d have hit it with a spade, to put it out of its misery.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
When Penny first told me what her dad did I misheard lobbyist for ‘hobbyist’ and went on for several months thinking he was an attic Airfixer or annexe egg-cup potter. And even now, like a young child, I couldn’t quite shake the conviction that my imagined version of him might turn out to have a basis in reality.
‘And have you been busy at work, lately?’ I asked.
He ignored this almost completely, giving just the husk of a laugh as he looked across the room.
‘Huh, yeah. Nice champagne,’ I offered, almost inaudibly, then a puckish variation: ‘Champagne is nice.’
Kenneth walked away, leaving me alone to clench my buttocks five times in a row as self-sentenced punishment for general social crimes, before Penny arrived.
‘Really, thanks, Andy.’
‘It was meant to be –’
‘It looks interesting.’ She turned to an illustrated cross section of the outboard motor of a Special Boat Service dinghy.
What was worst was that in its flumping thud to the ground my gift seemed to have caused no surprise at all, as if any oddity I offered up would have been indulged: a chewed bone; broken biscuits. That, like a child wrapping his mother’s hairbrush, I should be congratulated for offering anything at all.
‘I thought it would be funny, Penny – look at these fucking beefcakes!’
She flicked her eyes over the photo as Cally and Simon joined us and she said, ‘OK, listen, I’m going to do it now.’
‘Shit, yeah?’ said Cally.
‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘we should wait till at least –’
‘I think now is a good time,’ said Simon.
‘No,’ I agreed, catching up, ‘maybe, now is a good time. Is it? Would it be a good time, now?’
‘Look, I’ve waited and delayed. I got you all here as support and I’m very grateful for you coming and I should have done it last night, and Shannon and everyone is going to be here tomorrow and we need the credit card. So I’m just going to fucking do it. But if it goes weird, will you help? Don’t let me leave without saying it, all right?’
‘No pasarán,’ Simon said, clenching his fist playfully, and Penny did it back while I chuckled indulgently, like I knew what the hell they were on about.
Then Mrs Calman was upon us – ‘We’re thinking about just w
alking to the restaurant, is that all right?’
‘Mum, there’s something I need to tell you about the summer.’
‘Oh, right?’
‘I’m going to go. To Yugoslavia.’
‘Oh. Your idea?’
‘Yes. My idea. Our idea. We’re all going.’
Simon and I smiled: it’s going to be OK, we’re on board.
‘Well, let’s talk about this later,’ Mrs Calman said and gave a broad smile that tightened her mouth so her lipstick parted in places and revealed how white her lips were beneath.
‘But I am going.’
‘Look, let’s not spoil this evening. Let’s talk about it later.’
‘Fine, but I am going.’
And through the mist, Kenneth, the imperial gunboat, came in to dock.
‘What’s this?’
‘We’ll talk about this later. I’ll tell you later,’ Mrs Calman said.
‘I’m going to Bosnia, Dad.’
‘No,’ Kenneth said.
‘I am.’
‘No. No. No no no no. No,’ Kenneth argued.
‘Where? To do what?’ Mrs Calman asked.
‘I can’t believe you’d just say no.’
‘Well, if you just say you’re going I’m just going to say no,’ Kenneth said.
‘Well, I am going. I’ve got a ticket.’
‘Yes, well, I’ve got a chimney but it doesn’t mean I’m a train.’ I looked at the floor. ‘Where? How? Why? No,’ said Kenneth.
‘This is bollocks,’ Penny said and looked at Cally. They turned and walked out of the room and upstairs.
Simon and I, the men eager to take their daughter to be killed in a war zone, were left to explain things to the Calmans and the couple in cashmere jumpers.
‘I think we just feel that at this moment, in this – era that, Bosnia, it’s in Europe. And we have a responsibility to acknowledge that,’ Simon said.
‘I acknowledge that,’ Kenneth said.
‘We’re hoping, there’s a hope that . . .’ Simon carried on.
‘What are you actually doing?’
‘We have a van,’ I offered.
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