Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals

by Jesse Armstrong

  It sounded incredibly implausible, I could see that.

  ‘Well, the 5th Corps are making rapid advances so we are here to watch for human rights infringements as they advance.’

  ‘Oh, right. Good. That’s a good idea. Good,’ I said, and let the baseball bat drop as quietly as possible to the floor. Thunk!

  ‘Will you give your full details to my colleague, please?’

  ‘Of course. Avec plaisir,’ I smiled ingratiatingly. If I was a war criminal, I was going to be the nicest one in history. ‘We did a play? Maybe you heard of it?’ I said to the commanding officer and the thickset guy who was getting out several files and a legal pad. The Frenchman didn’t look at me; instead he pointed at two subordinates to investigate the path opposite my post. As the privates disappeared up the path beaten through the high grass, the little stand of trees at the top looked much less inviting.

  Now, right on cue, I saw the van approaching from a long way off. I felt angry as it chugged slowly towards me. My face grew hot. I had been seduced. This was what the posh got you to do. Guard concentration camps for them while they went to pick up the car.

  The French officer waved them down to a halt.

  ‘Where’s he gone? Where’s Hasim?’ I asked Penny, who was at the passenger-side window.

  ‘He stayed in town. What? What’s going on?’

  ‘It’s a camp. He got me to guard his camp?’

  ‘A camp? Like – camping?’ Von said.

  ‘No, not like camping. Like a fucking camp. For opponents.’

  ‘Oh shit.’

  At the driver’s window Onomatopoeic Bob talked through the situation with the officer, who placed a pair of clear-framed round plastic glasses on his long nose as he examined our travel documents. They made him look a little like Andy Warhol and I felt they were out of keeping with the seriousness of the UN mission. There should be army-issue eyeglasses. Camouflage, or at least black.

  ‘We can go,’ Onomatopoeic Bob said a minute later to Shannon and the rest.

  ‘But you, I need to talk with further,’ the officer said to me sternly.

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘For as long as we say!’ the thickset driver said, and squatted down, his automatic rifle beside him, so he could rest his file on his thigh as he wrote.

  ‘Should we wait?’ Shannon said.

  But they hadn’t even turned the engine off in the van.

  ‘How long will you be? Do you think?’

  I had no idea. Between three days and life was my private estimate.

  ‘Look. It’s OK. Go. I’ll take what’s coming. I’ll explain,’ I said and looked heroically at Penny.

  ‘Can you safeguard us?’ Shannon asked the Frenchman. ‘If we wait for our friend?’

  ‘No. We can safeguard nothing,’ the officer said.

  ‘Look. Go. You have to go, there’s no option really,’ I said.

  ‘Will you be OK?’ Penny said.

  I did hope she would stay. Stay and sit with me. After all, so far any successes with Penny had come from getting as physically close to her as possible, while as drunk or tired as possible and waiting for us to essentially fall into one another. My best friends in terms of seduction were proximity and gravity. So maybe if she would wait with me . . .

  ‘I’ll be OK,’ I said manfully. They took me at my word.

  Bob revved the engine and Von rubber-stamped the decision, coming round from the sliding door of the van to shake my hand.

  ‘This is a good number for me. Give me a ring,’ he said and handed me a slip of paper. ‘I won’t be there for three months.’

  ‘We will see you in Zagreb? Yeah?’ Shannon said and I just nodded. ‘Or in Manchester?’

  Penny leaned out of the van and offered me her balled-up hand. I went to take it, to shake it or kiss it, but the centre was soft like a chocolate and from it fell a crumpled fifty-pound note. As I unfurled it, it looked out of scale with my hand, so big I could have used it as a blanket.

  ‘In case – you need to get back, and it’s hard?’

  ‘Right. Thank you,’ I said and tried to look down not too coquettishly.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘You look – you look OK.’

  My shirt was open. Somewhere along the way I’d started to copy how Von and Christian left their shirts open three or four top buttons and turned their collars up. I guess I’d lost a little baby fat from no longer eating late at night, stoned, from twenty-four-hour garages.

  ‘Thank you. Some polish is gained with one’s ruin, I guess,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a poem. “Some polish is gained with one’s ruin.”’

  ‘What’s been ruined?’

  I looked at the money meaningfully. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’re not ruined.’

  ‘Yeah. And I mean, you did make me leave Helen?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s fine but –’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘Well, you did.’

  ‘I absolutely did not.

  ‘You did, you made that face.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about?’

  ‘We best rock,’ Von interjected and Onomatopoeic Bob revved hard.

  The French officer came and stood beside me like a gaoler.

  ‘Look, Andy, at least we did something?’ Penny said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah. No. Sorry. It is good to do something.’

  I looked down at my feet as the van pulled away and then up and after them, reproachfully, as they rounded a corner out of sight. I should have just said, ‘Yes stay. Definitely stay. Please stay.’

  *

  The thickset driver started on a series of questions, each of which was addressed to me first in French, then, when I shrugged in incomprehension, repeated in English.

  I tried to be as honest as I could, but confusion and bad translation and the complexity of the situation meant that I kept on sounding like I was lying or contradicting myself and eventually the driver screwed up a whole sheet of answers and threw it to the ground.

  He pulled out another sheet. I looked at that bend in the road, trying to summon a figure out of the mirage that quivered on the tarmac top.

  As we started on the questions again, like in a dream, a figure did appear. My heart flipped with excitement even as I tried to damp it down and say it’s not her, it’s not her . . .

  It wasn’t her. Or Shannon.

  It was Bev.

  He marched back purposefully, looking at the ground, but then glancing up to me and waving an arm. What message was he bringing? Were they waiting further along? Had someone swooned for my absence?

  ‘Couldn’t leave you, mate,’ he said.

  ‘Are they waiting?’ I said.

  ‘Are they waiting? Nah, mate, they’ve gone.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? I thought they’d go,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, they need to go. The 5th Corps are coming. It’s gonna be a shit show. But I thought you might need a hand.’

  ‘Oh, Bev. Bev. You’re a fucking sweetheart,’ I said. I hadn’t admitted to myself quite how scared I felt until he came back. But now I saw I wanted someone to be there for whatever interrogation I was to face, to confirm the stuff I said and help me phone the British Consulate and to begin the long haul of unravelling myself from this mess.

  ‘Where will you take me? Can my friend come? Just one?’ I asked the officer, who was back from a walk of the perimeter of the chicken farm.

  ‘We are United Nations Protection Force. We cannot detain you. Only a national authority can detain you. We are monitors.’

  ‘So you are not – you’re not taking me anywhere?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘I’m asking you more questions,’ the driver said, ‘for a long time.’

  ‘But if we want to go, mate?’ Bev said to the commanding officer.

&
nbsp; ‘No. We would like to ask you more questions,’ the officer said, taking off his glasses and wiping his brow.

  ‘Sure, but if we don’t want to?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I said and Bev looked at me like: don’t be a prick. ‘I mean, I’m happy to talk. But I would love to go?’

  ‘I would like to talk to you,’ the driver said.

  ‘Right, you’d like to, but you can’t make him?’ Bev said. The driver and the officer looked at one another and I felt relief and anger flood me at once.

  ‘You mean I could have gone – I could have gone with my friends?’

  ‘Yes, you can go. Anyone can go. I would like to talk to you, but you can go.’

  ‘Right. OK, then, I’m sorry, but I’m going to go,’ I said, and hesitated before I started to walk, just to check that he wouldn’t add, ‘Of course if you go you are contravening section two of our rules of engagement and we may shoot you in the neck.’

  He didn’t say that. And he didn’t say anything else. I said, ‘Then we go. I’m sorry. For the confusion and for the inconvenience. And for the record, I think you are doing wonderful work, here. I am sorry I can’t talk. It was a misunderstanding. Can you put on your report it was a misunderstanding? Thank you.’

  They weren’t about to thank a war criminal. So, as we began to walk off, the driver just tapped the paper where my details were recorded and nodded back towards town.

  Chapter 37

  HASIM HAD BEEN lying, it turned out. The border wasn’t far at all. Just after the main track up to the poultry farm, where two more Land Cruisers sat, their occupants off keeping watch at the main gates of the detention facility, the road slipped across a small valley and, with a couple of twists back on itself, into the borderland hills. We were accompanied by a family who joined the road from a countryside path, and also by a young man who pulled out of one of the few farmhouses along the way. He dragged a handcart with spoked bicycle wheels and a high-sided yellow inflatable paddling pool which sat almost perfectly on the square, flat piece of chipboard laid over the axle. Inside the pool were bundles of clothes neatly tied with string and in the centre one long MDF cabinet, the doors pushed open by plates and kitchenware and an ornate light fitting.

  The border out of Babo’s little bubble in Bosnia and into Croatia was guarded, but the atmosphere was relaxed. They weren’t exactly giving out gold stars, yet the sense was that if you’d made it this far you deserved to be left alone, granted a hard sympathetic nod of appreciation as you passed through. After all, no one but a friend would be seeking to run away from the enemy who was coming from the south. Bev and I had our passports to show, but the guard, an older man with a moustache whose bristles were widely spaced and thick like cat’s whiskers, waved us through, not wanting to get into the complicated questions. Perhaps he’d been alerted to our potential arrival by the occupants of the van that I hoped might be idling in a lay-by nearby? It wasn’t.

  We stayed that night in a farmer’s spare back room. Overcharged, up front, for an uncomfortable eight hours between polyester sheets that felt like they sparked against my sweat as I swivelled for cool. In the morning our host called us a taxi which took us to the border of the Serb Krajina. With our UK passports, all the borders were much more permeable going out than coming in. This was a set of states and statelets that wanted outsiders out, to do their business unobserved. Via a provincial bus, which seemed to be a charter, not scheduled, we went through Karlovac and into Zagreb, resting our heads on the shaking window and barely bothering to look at the bullet marks on the buildings any more.

  In the low grey bus station I exchanged my fifty-pound note at a brutalising exchange rate for tickets that would take us as far as Cologne. The route home was straight and boring. I sat with Bev as our mauve-and-turquoise liveried coach ate up the miles to central Germany. At Cologne I unzipped my last money-belt Deutschmarks to get us back into Calais on a luscious summer’s day where we used up the last little bit of credit on Bev’s card to board as foot passengers for Dover.

  And then, there it was again – England, with its brazen white cliffs. Great Britain. What a funny little nub of gristle it was when you looked at it. Half finished and uppity and scared and doubting. Wounded, bust-up and bursting into the street looking for trouble, with a memory of self-righteousness whirring in its breast. Fractured, wonky, amenable to a certain humour but deep down serious. Serious and, for some reason, hurt.

  We hitched out of Dover to London with a retired public-school master who, when we revealed we’d been in Bosnia, raised one corner of his mouth perhaps a millimetre and then asked no further questions. Instead he told us many details of his career in and around Salisbury and how a complicated piece of chicanery by a bad new head had swindled him, it would be no exaggeration to say, out of a fair final pension settlement.

  I navigated us to the Calman house by memory and pressed the doorbell in a haze: a fug of hope and fear and excitement. The cleaner answered and I said a cheery ‘Hello!’ like a family friend and asked for Penny – she said Penny wasn’t at home and, when I asked where she was, fetched Kenneth. I’m pretty sure he recognised me, but I introduced myself again to be sure. He left a brief pause and then said, ‘Oh. Yes. Penny’s on her way to France – she’s driving from Yugoslavia, to stay in her grandma’s house, with a whole pack of her pals.’

  ‘Oh, right. Whereabouts in France?’ I said.

  He scrutinised me for a moment and then said, ‘In France.’

  ‘I’m her pal,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said and looked at Bev in his ragged It’s a Kinda Magic tour T-shirt on the pavement opposite, cleaning his teeth with a lolly stick.

  ‘All right!’ Bev shouted over, raising an arm and revealing a fresh sweat patch and the whitish concentric rings of several previous ones.

  ‘Hello,’ Kenneth said, starting to back away from the door ever so slightly.

  ‘Can – can I have a glass of water?’ I asked.

  In the kitchen Kenneth let the tap run not at all before filling it and handing me the glass.

  ‘Umm. Thirsty!’ I said as I gulped the tepid, hard, London water.

  He stood there ‘patiently’, as though I was detaining him from matters of national importance, with a brochure from a mail-order corduroy trouser company in his hand.

  ‘Yes. Right. OK?’ he said and showed me the way back out with an extended arm.

  ‘I just wondered – about our trip?’ I said. ‘Whether you might have organised everything?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  I looked down at my scuffed Doc Martens as I steeled myself. ‘Sent us via your friend in Croatia, Ronnie, at the embassy? Through the North Sector towards Bihac – instead of Sarajevo? And then – got a message through, to sort of, push us into Velika? Into Babo’s town?’

  ‘I’m sorry? What?’ he said.

  ‘And whether you think it’s good there and that’s what they should all do, shut up and get on with it, and the government, our government, and I just wanted to let you know, it doesn’t work there. Velika. Maybe you thought we’d be safe there or something? Because we weren’t.’

  He looked at me and didn’t say anything at all. I drank more water, my lip trembling. Some of it dribbled down my chin.

  He turned, walked out and went back up the stairs without saying anything else to me, but mumbling what I think was ‘Miss Marple with a hard-on’ as he went.

  I stayed on a half-minute or so alone in the kitchen, looking at a row of copper pans suspended in size order on hooks, like a rarely used item in the percussion section of an orchestra. Then I stole a tangerine from the overflowing fruit bowl and left the house, shutting the door quietly behind me, and walked back to Bev.

  ‘All right?’ Bev asked.

  ‘Yeah. Bit of a cunt,’ I said and he nodded.

  ‘London,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  *

  At Victoria Coach Station, I used a British cash card outside a b
ranch of the Halifax to take money out. I said an audible ‘thank you’ to the machine as the cogs turned and the notes appeared. Bev and I climbed the three or four very steep steps up to the unfriendly Brummie driver and on into the coach’s familiar scent of British cleaning products. We stopped short of the smoking section. That was where the adventures happened, and we were both full for the moment. Once into the green belt, the countryside went past thick and extraordinarily – Amazonianly – lush as we zoomed up to the borders.

  I cracked open War and Peace. I’d had to go back and reread the section previous to the one I’d bookmarked so many times I was moving backwards through the text, and the Napoleonic invasion – that was making everything additionally confusing. After a while I skipped towards the end, to try to find out what happened, where I was headed, but found myself in quite a dense essay.

  ‘What’s it like, fucking Brainiac?’ Bev asked.

  ‘Oh – this? It’s – this bit is quite – it’s not so much story, it’s his, um, sort of theory of history.’

  ‘Oh, OK. What is it then?’ Bev asked after a while.

  ‘His theory?’ I deliberated for a bit. By the time I had formulated my precis, Bev was looking out of the window. ‘I think – he’d say, what happens is, you know, it’s not simple. It’s fucking complicated.’

  ‘OK,’ Bev said, wobbling his head and jutting his lip, giving Tolstoy due consideration. ‘Fair dos.’ But he didn’t look convinced.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Not really. I reckon, usually, if you’re not a wanker, it’s simple.’

  *

  Bev and I climbed down from our coach onto the pavement by the side of the A5, part outraged not to be met by fanfares, part so very pleased to be back on the rain-splattered summer tarmac of home, where we were just allowed to stand without papers or explanation or elaboration, and we knew how things would taste and how the vending machines worked and, mostly, what people meant when they looked at us.

  He asked what I was going to do, and I didn’t know, so we had two fast farewell pints in a pub on the main road. Across the way, on the road leading to Chirk Castle, there was building work in progress. We didn’t talk about Bosnia at all, but just about the last few hours and our hitchhike. He called his brother, who came and revved a Ford Escort hard outside the pub until Bev finished off his pint and shook my hand.