Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals

by Jesse Armstrong

  It was the day after our grim summit that I started falling over. The first time was on a patch of grease out the back of an Indian restaurant; then I walked into a lamp post and went over. The next time it just happened for almost no reason in the dark hallway that led to our internal front door. I began to feel a certain amount of respect for all the people I saw managing to stay upright all day. What skill, what judgement, to balance on just two legs!

  The worst one, the last big fall, came as I was fingering the gritty residue at the bottom of the pockets of my ex-army greatcoat. I was outside the Whitworth Gallery on my way to the building site, thinking unhappy Helen thoughts, hoping in my despondency I might look a little Ian Curtis, when I changed step to dodge an actual physical banana skin and hit some December black ice. I went over splat-flat and my palms went slap-smack on the pavement. There’s probably nothing as funny as an apparently confident young man in an oversized coat hitting the deck, hard. That’s definitely what quite a few schoolkids and students nearby seemed to think. My teeth crunched, bottom set hard into top, and my arm throbbed as I lay there, wanting to cry. Making it up onto all fours, I did wonder if I might not give up walking altogether as simply too ambitious a form of locomotion.

  There is a hospital right across the road from where I fell. But instead of feeling fortuitous, that was additionally insulting – like everyone but me knew I was going to go down. Hitting the button for the pelican crossing, my arm revealed itself to be newly rubbery. I couldn’t get purchase to press in the infinite whorls of the cold, concave stainless-steel button. I had to ask an old woman to do it for me.

  So that was how I met Von. And a few weeks later, his older sister.

  *

  The night I met Penny, Von warned me gravely that she was probably coming round, like she was some downer – an intellect who might X-ray us all and find us wanting. But when she came in – peck-pecking around at things, tall, as if, like a wading bird, her knees might bend backwards – and sat next to me on the settee, I breathed in her showered smell and my back tingled. It took me a while to get it straight that this tall beautiful black woman was the younger white boy’s sister. I rolled my next joint tight with love, crumbled in extra bonus flakes of the soft hash that expanded as you scorched it, licked the Rizla with a dry tongue just wet enough on the tip to stick it, and got ready to pass it from my lips to hers like a kiss.

  Her dark skin glowed caramel where the light from overhead hit her forehead and cheeks. I croaked, trying to let her know the joint was coming her way, but she didn’t hear me and when I touched her arm gently she turned sharply as if I’d overstepped the mark. But then her lovely lips formed a soft billowing ‘O’ of comic admonishment and I laughed. She took the joint and passed it on beyond without honking on it.

  Of course! Of course it wasn’t cool and great and fascinating to smoke dope. It was boring and stupid and predictable and I wanted to renounce it right there! But that might look a little psychotic, as I blew out a fat stream of grey-white smoke? Besides, I couldn’t frame the words correctly, partly because I was spiralling inwards, a little stoned. Finally I managed to ask what she was doing later – if she was going out, into town? She told me she was off to a meeting above a pub about Bosnia.

  The news sobered me like she’d emptied a washing-up bowl of cold water over my head. I gabbled; I explained how I read the newspaper every day; I tried to frame how weird it was that she would say that; I laid out my own personal foreign policy, not as well as I would have liked, but the headlines. She asked what I thought was going to happen over there, as they headed towards the summer. I said I didn’t really know, repeated some grim analysis I’d read. I couldn’t believe my luck. It was as though I’d found another person at a party who liked exactly the same difficult-to-get-into indie band as me: Balkan Slaughter, now working on ideas for their surprisingly vibrant third album. I was all of a sudden in my element, the fug of hash around my brain cleared, and between us we churned up a hearty froth of indignation.

  We left together, Penny linking her arm through mine like we were a country couple heading to the barn dance. We walked across the park to the bus stop under a row of great towering lime trees. I expressed my opinion that Europe stood on the precipice of a new age of barbarism, and I had never felt lighter or happier in my life.

  Where I grew up was white. White as white Mother’s Pride. But she was so extraordinary to me already – rich and London and bookish – that her skin colour was just a kicker. Before Penny, I think I’d harboured a fear that any individual person of colour might at any point in our relations request immediate verbal and/or financial recompense, from me personally, for the crimes of the British Empire and the transatlantic slave trade. But Penny, without knowing or trying, put me at my ease. Indeed, as we sat on the throbbing back seat of the bus talking fast and overlapping, it struck me that it was almost as though we were just two human beings.

  The meeting was in a sour-smelling room above a pub on the Wilmslow Road. There were twenty or so students in there and ten or more local folk – including a pair of concerned middle-aged white women and a whole Asian family who ate flatbreads from tinfoil as they waited for things to start, the teenage daughter embarrassed by her parents. Shannon, the woman whom I was told had put up the posters, Sellotaped them to trees and lamp posts, pinned them through the student union, arrived late, like a rock star, breaking the terrible English silence and the feeling that was growing among us: that we had all, somehow, done something wrong without doing anything at all.

  She strode up shouting ‘Hi, hello!’ in her friendly American way and everyone relaxed into the sense that yes, we were meant to be here and the start time was right and nothing odd or uncomfortable was going to happen. She made a little speech and then opened the floor for discussion. She had an excellent tone to her – made it possible to talk of heavy things with lightness, but without taking them lightly. She effortlessly occupied the role of leader, the fiery queen. Her American optimism was just the tart tang we needed for the litres of heavy, watery information we had imbibed about the Balkan situation. There was a solution. And we could help to achieve it. And therefore we should. Penny and I caught each other’s eye and in our little twitches and laughs we could tell we were both enjoying her, and in that mutual enjoyment I felt a band snaking round us, pulling us together.

  Shannon was a little older – maybe thirty or something, a bit of crinkle at the corners of her eyes. She wore a white vest that late-spring evening. Her arms were rich, nut-brown against it. Her face was sharp – a perky sniffing-out nose, hard high cheekbones and a jutting fuck-you chin. She looked ready for action. Ready to climb a tree, or down a drink; flat-chested and boyish, but also musky and alluring in her openness to the world. She retied her jumble of long brown curly hair often, and when she did so her vulnerable white underarms flashed to us like a swan offering its neck on a chopping block.

  Sara, her minder and primary disciple, sat up at the front beside Shannon, nodding and making a note of things in a Woolworths value jotter as she spoke. Sara looked small, neat and studious. She eyed those of us who’d turned up suspiciously – with an air that there was probably something unwholesome about our attendance, something she was eventually going to tease out. As her orange Bic scratched, and her head jerked in concentration, she moved the clean, thin, blonde hair that fell often in front of her grey eyes with irritation, as though this distraction had never before tested her patience. Her timing was interesting: she’d not write for long periods as practical details were discussed, then when Shannon hit an aside such as ‘war always hurts the weakest’ she’d write intently.

  Shannon’s idea, when she eventually rolled it out, was that some of us – as many as could fit – should go to Bosnia, in a van. She knew how to get hold of the van via a man named Bob. We would load up this van and take it to Sarajevo. Bob, a rather round, older hippy, watched from his semi-detached position leaning against the wall at the back of the room.r />
  ‘What?’ he said, pretending he had been distracted rolling a cigarette. ‘Sure thing. If that’s what the lady says.’ He took a sip of his pint of Guinness, looked down at his Mexican poncho and then back up and round the room with a rueful grin, making sure everyone had clocked the heart of gold he would have preferred to keep well hidden behind his ‘gruff’ exterior.

  ‘He’s a real “Bob”,’ Penny whispered, very close to my ear.

  ‘Bob Classic,’ I said back, hoping she’d say something else close and warm.

  ‘Onomatopoeic Bob,’ she said softly, and I was convinced I’d fallen quite strongly in love.

  A huge amount of that first meeting centred around the van. The getting of the van, the fitting out of the van, the number of seats in the van, what could and could not be fitted into the van. It felt after a while as if getting the van to Bosnia was, itself, at some level, the central aim of the trip.

  But beyond the van, and some supplies, Shannon’s idea, she explained at the next meeting a month later, was to write and perform a play. A play that would transmit a ‘mind virus’, the primary symptom of which would be peace. ‘Because peace can catch on just like war.’ Sara wrote very deliberately at that point, not clocking that Shannon had said it with exaggerated gravity, mocking the idea just enough to make it plausible.

  Shannon explained to us that we would zoom through the mountains, dropping our play like a good fart out the back of the van until – not this (but maybe this?) – the soldiers and the peasants and the intellectuals stopped for a moment in the presence of the majesty of the purity of youth bringing this simple strong idea to their mountain land with open hearts: peace.

  We’d lost a lot of the folk by the time of that second meeting, the couple of middle-aged women, the Asian family, the freshers out looking for friends. But there were some additions. Cally, Penny’s best friend, was with us. I tried not to resent her too much, sitting as an aggressively healthy barrier between us, shifting in her seat often, as I tried to catch Penny’s eye. Also, from a defunct socialist international-relations society: Christian. Hard, compact and serious. He’d grown up around Camden, he told us afterwards, downstairs in the pub, like he was turning over a winning poker hand. His clear pretty eyes looked like they were scanning your clothes and haircut to check if you were any kind of threat. He was into critical theory and left-wing politics the same way he was into his button-down shirts and imported Adidas shell-toe trainers – because they made him invulnerable.

  Penny was all lit up by the idea of the play. ‘A play!’ she said to Cally, who repeated it back to her over the pub table. Cally was a drama student and Penny, I knew, wanted to write plays, so they got quite excited together.

  Of course, I was aware it was a little optimistic, Shannon’s plan for the play, but up above the Hope and Hegemony, or whatever it was called, as that May day fizzed out, the clouds above just puffs of jokes about rain, I did think that maybe this gang could bring something good to the war – that perhaps stout heart and noble head were something in themselves?

  *

  ‘OK, you all know the situation, so the question now is, who’s actually coming?’

  When she finally popped the question, it felt like the previous twelve weeks of meetings had been a long set-up to the joke of non-intervention, and now the pictures of the dead Shannon passed around were the punchline. And you had to laugh. We were doing nothing while the strong massacred the weak. We could take food, we could take sustenance, but the best thing we could take, Shannon said, like Sontag taking Godot to Sarajevo, was something that announced clearly: we are people too and you are our brothers and sisters.

  ‘Another’s pain is not our own,’ she said to those of us sitting in a circle at Penny and Cally’s attic flat. We’d shifted there six or seven weeks in, once the hard core was set. It was ideal for me. I got to see Penny’s kitchen; the poems on the fridge; the collection of single lost gloves she’d found and spray-mounted along the hallway wall. And sometimes, like some terrible freak, on my way to the bathroom, I’d poke my nose into her room and smell it: the delicious nothingy smell from her wide-open window, and scan the spines of her books, trying to remember an eyeful so I could read them and think of things to say.

  ‘But what if it was?’ Shannon went on. ‘What if we could send feelers out around the globe – if we could all sense from afar at the end of these tendrils of feeling – every discomfort in the world? What if you shrivelled at every rape in China? What if no one could rest until everyone was content? That would be paradise, wouldn’t it? That would be heaven on earth? If the web that held us all was infinitely closely woven, and if every person in the street would stop to catch you if you fell? So that’s why we’re going. We’re going to say: another’s pain is ours.’

  Penny looked at me, too sombre to smile, and I nodded back at her. Maybe tonight I should finally try something?

  ‘These evolutions of sympathy have been the leapfrogging of civilisation itself.’ Shannon paused, taking a quick look at some biro on the back of a receipt. ‘To feel common feeling, outside the family, the tribe, the clan, the region, the nation, across boundaries of colour and creed and gender and sexuality – that’s been evolution as much as learning to make bronze and steel and atom bombs. In fact, it sometimes seems to me that maybe the two impulses are in a race? And we’re going to see which outstrips the other? The push of the spear’s point, or the rush and gush of the unstoppable water of fellow feeling, spilling through the gullies and the valleys out around the world, seeing what flames it can’t quench?’

  Sara didn’t feel the need to write any of this down. She just looked round at us from Shannon’s side and nodded like this was exactly how she would have put it, and now they were going to finally find out what kind of shitheads they were dealing with.

  When Shannon popped the straight question, ‘Who’s coming to Bosnia?’ Simon’s hand was quickest to go up. This was his very first week of involvement, and I stared at him hard; as you would do at a man who has walked into Westminster Abbey by a side door during a coronation and casually put the crown on his own head.

  Then Penny’s hand went up – I didn’t realise she was so set. Then another and another. And suddenly, in the space of a few seconds, I went from a man who was weighing up his options, to a man about to miss out on his dearest wish, which – I had just realised – was to take a peace play to Bosnia and extend the evolution of humanity to a new continuum.

  But I got my hand up just a little too late. Beaten by a health-food cooperative worker named Kyrk. So as Shannon asked us the tie-breaker – why we wanted to come and what skills we could bring – I decided to roll out my trump card: my grandfather, and his special history.

  ‘Look, I actually want to go because, my dad’s dad, my grandpa, was a Yugoslav. Where I come from, a lot of Serbs came after the war, to the area, so it’s quite personal and also, I speak it, Serbo-Croat. Because of my dad.’

  ‘OK, fuck. Really?’

  ‘I understand more than I speak,’ I admitted

  ‘But you can say things?’ Sara asked.

  ‘Yes. I can make myself understood,’ I said.

  ‘Kyrk?’

  Kyrk looked afraid. ‘I am able to – I know the edible mushrooms. Many puffballs are edible.’

  I could feel people smile.

  And so, like a liberal Magnificent Seven of eight, saddling up to ride to the rescue of the peasants, the team was assembled: Shannon, our Lenin, our leader. Sara, her assistant, full of an unfriendly infinite pity for the world. Simon, my enemy, self-proclaimed ‘poet’, and soon to be author of a coruscating editorial for the university paper entitled ‘Why We Go’, which made Penny, and also, I’m ashamed to say, myself, shiver with the thrill of our moral superiority when we reread it. Cally, who wore a face of sustained irony in the course of all our conversations – on any topic from international affairs to jam doughnuts – because, I suspected, she had no idea what in the world was serious and
what was not. Christian, clever, clean, socialist, unsmiling, half with us, half hating us. Onomatopoeic Bob, our hippy van master. And finally Penny, who, it had been agreed, after Shannon read her unfinished script, The Night Dog, about a Border collie who comes to stay with a family and draws out their dark secrets (excellent, I had decided on a third reading), should author our peace play.

  And couldn’t Kyrk squeeze in too? Into a Kyrk-shaped jag, stuffed like a beanbag between the boxes in the back? Well, no. The belief that only eight could fit in the van, plus the aid, was a self-protecting mantra that Shannon and Sara, and eventually all of us, repeated in defence of the seriousness of the trip. That we would set off for a war zone in a thin-skinned rackety Ford? Fine. But that we would risk censure from the Belgian traffic police for driving over-capacity? That was too much.

  Chapter 6

  AT THE APPOINTED meeting place, a residential car park near Regent’s Park, I humped a bag of rice into the van. Bob had driven it down overnight – a modified blue Mark 2 Transit with a stubby, slightly apologetic nose. I knew the rice sack well. Accompanied by Penny, I had collected it along with three others when we spent a happy day kerb-crawling through Rusholme doling out the gang’s aid budget – an envelope of twelve thinning tenners. The mass of rice shifted like unresponsive flesh beneath its plastic-fabric sacking, resistant to my attempts to dig finger-holds. Nearby, the string bags full of onions we’d bought way too early gave off a sweet stink from a single onion rotting in there somewhere.

  Shannon, Sara and Christian joined us in the car park, having spent the night at Christian’s place. Now they stood around a newspaper spread out on the van’s bonnet as Christian made savage comments about the reports from the peace negotiations.