by Tony Park
The only thing that worried him about Carmel was her clinginess. She’d dropped more than one hint that she saw them continuing their romance after he returned to England. ‘I’ve always wanted to travel to the UK and my stint with the army will be up in eighteen months,’ she’d said.
‘Carmel, I could be posted anywhere in the world – you know what it’s like. After the army I’m thinking about Médecins Sans Frontieres or something similar. I want to see more of the world, not be tied down.’
She’d nodded supportively and not pressed the issue. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to settle down with her – he just didn’t want to settle down at all. He thought that if he did settle into an ongoing relationship it might be better if he found a partner who was likewise nomadic in her work life. It was partly his fault, for telling her, in a moment of weakness, that he loved her.
Above the pounding of the shower he heard a knock on the bathroom door. ‘Everything OK in there?’
He slid the shower curtain open. He knew he should say that yes, he was fine, thank you very much. He knew that he shouldn’t have had more than one drink, and that he should just dry off, get dressed into his filthy uniform, take what pictures she had and go. The old man had fought through his pain to stress the importance of the photo and perhaps it would make sense to the military intelligence people in the UN mission, but the original had been lost. He knew Carmel was waiting for him. He wanted to do the right thing, but the words wouldn’t come.
The door opened. He turned his head and saw in Liesl’s eyes what they both needed to do to forget this terrible day.
His silence seemed to embolden her. She lifted her T-shirt over her head as she crossed the floor. He saw she’d already removed her hiking boots and socks. Her fingers were at the button at the top of her jeans. She kept her eyes locked on his as she slid her jeans down, tugging her pants at the same time. She wasn’t drawing it out, or teasing him. He knew what she was feeling. It was a need, nothing more. Naked, she stepped over the rim of the bath. He felt himself growing hard as she wrapped her arms around him and he felt her breasts pressing against his back. She kissed the back of his neck. ‘Clean me.’
Richard turned his body to her, wishing he was a stronger, better man. They kissed, drawing it out as he moved her into the stream of water. He broke from her and pushed the wet hair from her face and squeezed some shampoo into the palm of his hand, then massaged it into her hair.
She turned from him and lifted her face so he could kiss her again as he worked her hair into a lather. As the water rinsed her he stayed behind her, taking the soap and rubbing it over her chest, breasts, belly, and into the tangle of her pubic hair. She pushed back against him and his cock slipped between the cleft of her cheeks as he reached under her and soaped her some more. Richard dropped the soap and let the water rinse his hand. Liesl groaned as he slid the length of his middle finger down over her hard bud and then into her. She reached behind her, groping for him, encircling him.
Richard felt his arousal boiling inside him, but wasn’t ready for this to end yet. He dropped to his knees, pulling himself from her grip. He turned her, so her back was against the tiled wall, and pushed her legs apart. She grabbed his shoulders to stop from slipping as he retrieved the soap and slid the bar up and down her legs. Richard was addicted to women – the touch, the smell, the taste of them. He buried his face in her and revelled in the soft folds of her as the water cascaded down off her body onto him. She ran her fingers through his hair.
When he sensed Liesl was close he stopped and stood and felt the added rush from seeing the naked longing, close to begging, in her eyes. He smiled.
‘Bastard,’ she whispered.
He grabbed a handful of wet hair and pulled on it, drawing her head back so he could kiss her neck. ‘Bitch.’
Liesl groaned again.
Carmel didn’t like him talking dirty to her, so Liesl’s muttered profanity was like a shock to his system, bringing him back from relationship land to the world of raw, animal fucking. He loved it. He spun her around again so she was facing the wall and reached around her, spreading her with his fingers and grazing her clit as he pushed against her.
‘Fuck me,’ she said again, her right cheek pressed against the tiles. She hadn’t mentioned protection and his lust had overcome his common sense. She put her foot up on the rim of the tub and he entered her from behind, driving up into her in one hard thrust.
‘Yes.’
‘Beg,’ he said.
‘Yes, please. More . . .’
Liesl cried out.
*
Carmel drove the Land Rover through the streets of Kigali. The padre, an Anglican minister named Michael, was in the seat next to her, and a soldier, their bodyguard, was sitting in the back. All three were armed with F-88 Steyr assault rifles.
‘To tell you the truth, while I’m not pleased, it’s good to actually be doing something. I know that’s a terrible thing to say,’ Michael said.
Carmel didn’t reply. She gripped the steering wheel so hard it hurt her palms. She wanted to scream, but couldn’t in front of the minister without having to provide an explanation. She didn’t understand why Richard was taking so long to get back to the barracks, and resented having to go out looking for him. She drove down Avenue de la République and turned into the car park of the old bank where she knew Liesl Nel and some of the other media people were camped.
Carmel nodded to a security guard sitting on an old bar stool by the gate and he touched a hand to his cap. She hated this and the irony was that she’d volunteered to break the news to Richard when the signal had come into the communications centre. She’d made the call to London, to the point of contact that had been included in the message.
Carmel came to the glass door of the building but couldn’t see inside because of the old bedsheets that had been tacked up inside to act as makeshift curtains. She knocked.
Liesl opened the door. ‘Hello? It’s um . . .’
‘Carmel. Captain Carmel Shang. I’m the UNAMIR legal officer. We’ve met.’
‘Ja, of course. Can I help you with something?’
The fair-haired South African woman was barefoot, in a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. Her hair was wet. Carmel sniffed the air and was fairly sure the smell was marijuana smoke. A man inside coughed. ‘Is Captain Dunlop here?’
Liesl took a step back and looked over her shoulder. Carmel peered in as the door was opened wider. Richard was sitting on a tattered armchair in the midst of a messy lounge area. He stood and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Carmel, Padre . . .’
‘Can I come in?’ Carmel asked, fighting to keep her voice businesslike.
‘Ja, of course. Would you like a drink?’ Liesl asked.
Carmel took in the two glasses and the near-empty bottle of rum on a rickety coffee table.
‘Mightn’t be a bad idea,’ Michael whispered behind her.
‘No, thank you,’ Carmel said.
‘What is it?’ Richard asked.
She thought his cheeks were colouring. She looked at his hair again – she loved his hair – and saw that it was wet, like Liesl’s. Carmel started to feel light-headed as the clues littered around her fell into place. On the far side of the tellers’ counter she saw an open door and an office converted to a bedroom. The sheets were rumpled and two wet towels were draped over the door.
‘Richard, your father’s dead,’ Carmel said.
The padre stepped out from behind Carmel. ‘Richard, I’m so sorry for your loss. We’re making arrangements now to get you home to England.’
‘I . . . how . . . ?’ He looked at Carmel and she almost felt sorry for him.
‘It was a heart attack,’ the padre said, stepping forward and putting a hand on his arm. Carmel felt the emotion rise up inside her. She wanted to cry but knew she couldn’t.
‘Richard, I’m so sorry,’ Liesl said.
Carmel looked at her and wanted to slap her face.
‘Right,’ said Richa
rd. He turned to Liesl. ‘Best be off then.’
Carmel wanted to punch him, to pound on his chest with her fists and hurt him. He didn’t deserve their sympathy. ‘The funeral’s a week from today.’
‘Right,’ he said again.
He was all English stiff upper lip and understatement, she thought. As Richard came to her she saw how he was unable to meet her eyes. ‘Yes,’ Carmel added. ‘I spoke to Juliet, she’s helping your mother with the plans for the service.’
He stopped, already past her but not looking back. ‘Juliet?’
‘Yes, you remember Juliet; the nurse you’ve shared a flat with for the past year. She answered the telephone at your parents’ house when I called. Apparently she drove up as soon as she heard the news. Juliet asked me to pass a message to you, telling you how much she loves you.’
8
ZAMBIA, 2012
Carmel looked out the window of the Comair Boeing 737–400 as the aircraft started its descent to Livingstone Airport. Far off to her right she could see what looked like a line of smoke rising from a fissure cut into the African bush. It was, she realised after gazing at it a while, spray rising from the Victoria Falls.
Apart from that sudden drop into the massive rent in the land, the geography here seemed very flat compared to Rwanda, which from the air looked rumpled and scrunched, like an unmade bed. The valleys and folds of Rwanda had flooded with blood and they still hid bones. Zambia, she knew, had suffered decades of corruption and mismanagement, and the verdict was still out on its newly minted government, but if they had to choose between graft and the other major sociopolitical malaise that had infected much of Africa – war and genocide – then she imagined the people who lived in Livingstone would probably prefer the former.
Carmel forced the thoughts from her mind and stretched out her legs – she’d been lucky enough to move to a vacant seat in the exit row after take-off. She raised a fist to her mouth to stifle a yawn. The images from the files came back to her. A couple of the men she would be prosecuting in this next round of cases in Arusha were Tutsis – former mid-ranking officers in the RPA who had taken part in the slaughter of Hutus at the Kibeho refugee camp. The men were scapegoats, arrested so the government could claim it wasn’t just settling old scores with the Hutu génocidaires. She wondered if the men were guilty of more than killing unarmed people – as if that wasn’t enough – and whether some other transgression was behind them being offered as sacrifices.
Carmel remembered the trucks coming back from Kibeho, and the soldier, Rick Green, who had challenged her. It was a telling moment in her life. She had never felt so helpless, so bereft of words – a scary proposition for a lawyer – as when that infantryman, stained with blood and grime, had challenged her to make sense of the law under which the UN mission operated. It was, she long ago realised, the reason why she had come back to Rwanda to work as a prosecutor for the ICTR. She’d needed to make sense of what had gone on and to try to right the wrongs that the UN assistance force had been unable to stop.
Recalling that incident with Greeny also dredged up painful memories of Richard coming to her rescue. The complete and utter bastard.
She’d found it hard to trust any man after the way he had betrayed her. After her tour in Rwanda was up she had returned to her posting as the legal officer at brigade headquarters in Townsville. The day-to-day work of prosecuting or defending drunken absent-without-leave soldiers bored her, and the scenarios put to her on the monotonous round of field and command-post exercises seemed to her to bear no relationship at all to the myriad complex legal challenges a real UN deployment had presented to her and the soldiers who had endured the horrors of Rwanda.
A captain in the 2nd/4th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment had come to see her one day, to talk about a soldier who had been arrested after a brawl in town, and he had noticed the UNAMIR plaque hanging on her wall and the photograph of a huge silverback mountain gorilla.
‘I was with the first rotation,’ he’d said, moving to the photo to take a closer look. ‘We didn’t get time to go sightseeing and tracking gorillas.’
‘My tour was like a holiday,’ she’d replied flippantly.
He’d asked her out and she’d said yes. Carmel lived in a small, lonely one-bedroom flat off base. She’d fended off many subtle and not-so-subtle come-ons from other officers, but despite his shaved head and lean body, there was something vulnerable about Dan that attracted her. And he’d been to Rwanda.
Over their first dinner she finished most of the two bottles of wine they’d ordered, plus two gin and tonics. He joked about her tolerance and she thought it a compliment. She let him take her to bed that night and revelled in the feel of his hard body under her fingertips. They talked afterwards in the dark, her head resting on his chest, about their time in Africa. She asked him, the booze talking, if he’d been affected by the bloodshed she knew the first contingent had encountered.
‘We did OK, my boys and me,’ Dan said. ‘I was a platoon commander and I knew every man I deployed with. We were a team, you know?’
Carmel nodded, but it hadn’t been the same for her.
‘At night,’ Dan continued, stroking her hair, ‘we’d sit around, and after the formal debrief and orders for the next day we’d just talk – about the stuff we’d seen. Pretty emotional shit sometimes, but it helped, you know?’
She didn’t. The headquarters where she worked was a collection of individuals thrown together from various units. They hadn’t trained and lived together for months on end prior to Rwanda, as Dan and his infantrymen had. There wasn’t the same camaraderie or the same opportunity to talk or even cry together. Each night Carmel had retreated to her single room, left to her own thoughts. She hadn’t seen what Dan and his boys had seen, had rarely ventured out past Kigali, but in a way that made it even harder for her to get her head around what had gone on in the country.
‘What was it like for you?’ Dan asked.
‘Oh, fine . . .’ She was tired by then, sated by the wine and the sex. ‘I spent most of my time in the headquarters. I didn’t see as much bad stuff as you did, and I went sightseeing – gorilla trekking.’ He let it go and she lay there, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling as he drifted off to sleep.
She moved in with Dan two months later and they married within a year. They told each other and anyone who would listen that the frequent absences from each other as they went off to different army exercises and courses were good for their relationship. The truth, however, was that Carmel found it increasingly hard to deal with the weeks of lonely nights without Dan. Her drinking increased and there was more than one day she had to call in sick, unable to face the glare of day. She and Dan would go out to dinner to celebrate one or the other’s return home and he would end up chastising her for slurring her words too soon, or being too tired for sex. He eventually suggested she seek help and she abused him.
The more Dan tried to help her, the more resentful she became. When they were home together he started spending nights out socialising with other officers – boys’ nights out. She was, Carmel realised, an embarrassment to him, and the realisation just made her feel more morose and crave more alcohol. Dan had always been fit – a requirement in his job – but he started going for longer runs in the morning and long marches in the cool of the evening dressed in his shorts, trainers and T-shirt, but carrying a full pack and webbing. He told her he was getting in shape to attempt the gruelling Special Air Service selection course. He told her it would be good for his career, but Carmel knew enough about the army to understand that an intelligent, hard-working young captain would do better in the battalion than in the SAS where promotion opportunities were rare. She wondered if the real reason he was volunteering for special forces was to get away from her.
Dan passed selection for the SAS and, after completing a string of courses that kept him away from Carmel for months, he was sent to East Timor, where an Australian-led UN intervention force was re-establishing order
after the vicious infighting that followed the fledgling nation’s decision to break from Indonesia.
There were no vacant postings for legal officers in Western Australia, where the SAS was based, so Carmel stayed in Townsville, marking time at the brigade headquarters. By the time Dan returned from Timor she had decided to leave the army and try to get a job in a civilian law firm in Perth. ‘I never intended to stay in the army long term.’
‘Don’t do it for me, Carm,’ he said when she told him of her decision.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve been thinking while I’ve been away. It’s not worth it. I’m not happy, you’re not happy. I’m just going to keep being posted away with the army. You’re from Queensland – your family’s here. You’ll be miserable if you move to Perth.’
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Is there another woman?’
He looked her in the eye and shook his head. ‘No.’
And she believed him, which made it all the more difficult to deal with. He wasn’t leaving her because he’d fallen for someone else – he just didn’t want to be with her. ‘It’s not worth it,’ he’d said.
After Dan left that last time, she spiralled out of control, and her colleagues at the headquarters noticed it. There was an embarrassing incident after a mess dinner where she fell into the base swimming pool, fully dressed, and had to be carried home. She had brief affairs with two other officers, and the gossip about the drunken, promiscuous lawyer became a running joke on the base. The senior legal officer from 1st Division headquarters called her into his office and recommended she seek professional counselling.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, from her time in Rwanda, had been the diagnosis from the civilian psychiatrist the army sent her to.
