Six thirty-five. I wanted a shower but already it was too late. I went into the bathroom for a pee. She’d have friends at the refuge, and be looked after in her own country by a man who obviously cared about her. I pulled the plug and heard the plunger rattle in the cistern. Empty. The damn thing leaked and I had tied the ballcock up with a rubber band to stop it filling. No time to tinker with the plumbing. I picked up my Bergen and led her down the stairs and out into the street.
My neighbourhood was an ill-assorted collection of cut-price apartment blocks like mine, a few tatty older houses set back from the road behind iron railings, and a car park occupying a row of vacant lots. Usually, you could look to the east from my door and enjoy an uplifting view of snow-capped mountains, but today they were smothered in a miasma of polluted brown air. The sun was up, but had managed only to smear a little dingy light across the lower fringes of the sky. It was raining again, a settled, drenching kind of rain that left a taint of burnt diesel on the lips.
We didn’t have to wait long for a taxi. Skopje was the new home for legions of government and government-sponsored employees from all the concerned nations of the West, and the people of the city were milking them accordingly – via a parallel economy of impromptu restaurants, bars, hotels, nightclubs and taxicabs. I flagged one down and handed over the scrap of paper on which I’d written the address.
‘There first, then I’m going on to the NATO base just south of Blace.’
The girl got into the back seat and I climbed in after her, while the driver lit a cigarette and examined the paper. He was about fifty, with a wrinkled, stubbly face and profuse grey hair, rather dressily combed and stained a treacly brown by the suspension of tobacco smoke inside the car.
He turned and studied the girl. ‘I look after her now, OK?’
‘No. Take us to that address.’
‘I drive girl here—’ he tapped the paper, showering ash onto the passenger seat. ‘My friend drive you to base. Good, yes?’
‘Just drive,’ I said, meeting his eyes in the rear-view mirror.
‘Sorry, I take you, please, no problem. Sorry.’
I was in full-blown heroic mode again, my impatience to get back to war set aside while I kept my young charge safe from predatory taxi drivers. After driving for ten minutes through a district of rundown tenements on the eastern edge of town, we pulled up outside a ramshackle two-storey villa.
I wiped the condensation off the window and looked out. It didn’t look like the right place to leave a child. There were black hoppers surrounded by knotted rubbish bags and a motorbike with its entrails spread across the pavement. The house had a green-tiled roof patched with plastic sheeting where the tiles had fallen off. The porch had sheared away from the front door and lay on its side across a row of beer crates. A huge satellite dish was set up in the back of a pickup parked in the yard alongside the building. Beyond it I saw a line of corrugated-iron shacks with padlocked doors and a skip covered with a tattered blue tarpaulin. A large, brindled dog with pendulous ears and emaciated hindquarters stood shivering in the lee of the pickup.
This wasn’t what I’d expected. . . But then, as I told myself briskly, this is Skopje, not some well-to-do Surrey suburb. People who helped the Church in its charitable endeavours didn’t have to live in well-kept homes. We got out of the taxi and made our way up to the front door. I knocked on the glass and the dog emitted a series of croaky barks which suggested it regarded its custodial duties with a mixture of reluctance and terror. I knocked again, and finally the door was opened by a girl in her early twenties with startlingly blonde hair and sleepy eyes. There was a faintly resentful cast to her mouth, but when she saw us she smiled cheerfully enough, and I had the impression of a good-natured person. She spoke to the girl beside me, who looked hopefully up at her.
‘Thank you, mister,’ the young woman was saying to me. A smell of hot fat wafted out from the passage behind her. She reached out to put her arm round the girl’s shoulders and the lapel of her dressing gown fell forward, revealing a triangle of soft, pale skin at the upslope of her breast. She saw me looking at her and smiled again. The floor of the passage was covered with newspaper, and there was no bulb in the light fitting. I was in a state of confusion, you must understand, my mind bouncing and skittering, my feelings blunted and swollen like beaten limbs.
‘Look after her, OK?’
The hair was dyed, I saw now. Was this how it ended? No officials with ID tags and practised smiles, no rigmarole of forms, databases, stamps and numbers – just this plump-breasted young woman in a seedy house on Syrna Street. Should I ask for a receipt, like a courier delivering a parcel?
I turned to the girl and held out my hand. She took it solemnly and we looked into each other’s eyes. . . And then the dyed-blonde was guiding her away down the passage and closing the door behind her, and the moment to turn back had passed.
5
I climbed into the passenger seat of the taxi, because I am six foot four and there wasn’t much legroom in the back. I didn’t notice that the girl had left her white plastic bag behind until I was paying off the driver outside the gates to the NATO base. I was tempted to leave it there, but the priest’s words came back to me: The poor things get so attached to their few treasures. I took it to the guardpost and, when I’d shown my ID and sat down opposite the desk to wait for the duty sergeant to check that I was who I said I was, opened it and looked inside.
Not a box, but a book. And not just any old book but a leather-bound volume, extensively tooled in gold leaf and secured with a brass lock on a thick leather hasp. The words Book of Prayer were stamped on the front, and beneath them, A spiritual record. It was a treasure all right, but it belonged to the priest, not the girl. It was heavy and as thick as a Bible. I tried the lock and the book fell open in my hands. Quite a few pages had been torn from the back, suggesting the priest didn’t treat this object with quite the veneration its ceremonial appearance seemed to demand. Maybe he’d used the thick, powdery vellum to write a note to the cleaner or amuse the children with paper darts. I liked him for that irreverence.
Father Daniel had showy handwriting, even and upright but the shapes bold and full and the serifs adorned with neat flourishes. The page I was looking at was covered with it, all set out inside boxes and margins he’d drawn to divide up the big white space. Lord, I have delivered myself unto Thee, I read. Nothing I do but I do it at Thy bidding and in Thy name. I turned the page. Today I considered the text given us by your servant St Anthony: Do not question your Lord, but be sure that he who is pure in heart and true to his calling in God cannot stray far from the path set out for him.
I was educated at a succession of Catholic boarding schools, and this sort of meandering self-reinforcement was very familiar to me. I turned to the front of the book to see if there was anything like a table of contents, but instead I found a poem typed out on a sheet of paper and folded inside the cover:
The sea spits ice, the masthead swipes the sky,
The bulging hull leans drunken on the swell,
And creaking braids weep bitter tears of brine.
Braced in the hold, I hear the net clump down,
The load of writhing slides across the deck,
A flow of gleaming stink, a slapping stream
Of mouthing jaws and gills blown open wide,
Torn scales, pink slime, a thousand drowning eyes.
I hook my elbow to the rung and shovel ice.
Watch if the load shifts. . . The cord at my waist
Sounds a bell on deck. I can call for help. I do.
But it’s God who hears, and He’s a fisherman, too.
I couldn’t square this weird poem with the routine pieties elsewhere in the book. Jesus offered to make his disciples Simon Peter and Andrew ‘fishers of men’, and the symbolism would resonate with any Christian minister. So why the resignation, the disappointment, the sense that the cry for help is heard but goes unanswered? At the foot of the page was a note, h
andwritten in that showy script of his: Weakness. A terror that will not relax its grip.
I was about to flip through and see if there were any more of these unsettling poems – or prayers or laments or whatever you wanted to call this one – when I saw the following edict printed inside the front cover:
All members of the Order of St Hugh are bound by their vows to keep a private record of their spiritual development. Any person into whose hands this book may fall is earnestly requested to respect the special nature of its confidentiality by refraining from perusal of its pages, and further to return it care of the Rector-General of the Order of St Hugh, The Old Rectory, Huddlestone Road, Northampton NN10 0AE, so that it may be restored to its owner.
I shut the book quickly, feeling as if at any moment a bony-fingered monk might catch me by the shoulder and tell me how I had sinned and what would be the consequence. I pressed home the latch at the end of the hasp and found that it wasn’t in fact unlocked. It was broken. The sergeant was tapping on the desk and I looked up.
‘You’re with TJ Farah, right? He’s expecting you. Know where to go?’
‘Yes. There a BFPO on site?’
He gave me directions. I found the post office and the grunt at the counter handed me a form to fill in – an army classic: name, rank, ID, DOB, destination, return address, contents. . . Then it cost me ten dollars to persuade him to perform the arduous task of putting Father Daniel’s Book of Prayer in a padded bag and stapling it shut. At last I was free to go in search of my unit. I found them already sitting in the Mercedes people carrier with blacked-out windows.
‘Captain Jimmy Palatine,’ said Peanut, his voice gritty with spite. ‘No one knows what he’s for, but he tags along anyway, sure as a hair on a Dundee tart’s backside.’
The atmosphere inside the van was grim. No one looked at me as I climbed in.
‘Morning, comrades,’ I said, somewhat aggrieved by the cold shouldering. ‘I got the girl safe. How’s Azza?’
‘Azza’s dead,’ said TJ.
6
We were driven down the bumpy track to the place where we’d been picked up the previous night – our regular crossing point into Kosovo. No one spoke. There was so much anger compressed inside the van it felt as if the windows might blow out. At least we didn’t have to go back to the farmhouse – the AA unit we were after had gone east. Back on the remote plains above the border we moved fast, as if to demonstrate what we could do when released from the burden of stray children and wounded comrades, and because TJ understood the cathartic power of motion – of running the body up to peak capacity and keeping it there until everything else gets stripped away, everything except the mechanical challenge of supplying energy to muscle and the mental challenge of trying not to stumble or lose heart. By the time TJ called a halt at the crest of a long ridge, we’d made twenty-seven kilometres over awkward terrain in three hours flat. We got off the track, dropped our Bergens and stood stretching and panting in the cold air.
A sharp wind hummed in the trees, and the air up here smelled clean and sweet as peeled bark. Southern Kosovo is a beautiful place. The cloud had lifted and it was as if a different dimension had yawned open above our heads, miles and miles of pale, scoured blue, thin as tracing paper where the sun’s corona filtered out from the east. The wet hillside opposite gleamed like hammered silver beneath a far horizon soft as still-warm ash. A heron cranked its way across the sky, legs trailing like broken struts, head disparagingly cocked.
Our mission was to locate the Serbian anti-aircraft units positioned across Kosovo so they could be taken out by JDAMs in the prelude to a NATO bombing campaign. Satellite imagery gave us intermittent snapshots of the emplacements, but the tree cover was dense and it was easy enough to move them by night; and the Serbs had been constructing dummy guns to confuse us further. So it had been decided that a number of joint SAS/Int Corps teams should be sent in to firm up the intel on the ground. In due course, the guided missiles would do their work and the bombers could cruise by unmolested.
We were hampered by the fact that the public line was that there wasn’t going to be any bombing campaign: the Serbs would be persuaded – at a grand peace conference near Paris – to leave Kosovo to the Kosovar-Albanian majority without having their hand forced by thousands of tons of high explosives. The UK government was privately sceptical; but still, our operation had to be carried out under conditions of strictest secrecy. Even requesting intel from KLA sympathisers in the region was forbidden.
Eager to test myself in the field, I’d volunteered for the role – and my CO, Colonel Andy Hillson, had agreed to let me go. I was a source of vexation to Hillson: I was supposed to be the Int Corps’ shiny new tech, and he’d been boasting about the extraordinary potential of a hacking device I’d been working on; but so far I’d shown more interest in learning how to blow things up. I’d declined a technical consultancy and liaison role at GCHQ and threatened to take a job in the private sector if they didn’t find me something more interesting to do. Evidently someone had decided I ought to be humoured, and when I found out I’d be joining TJ Farah in Kosovo, I thought my little campaign could not have turned out better.
What evidence I had suggested that our current target was roughly five kilometres to the north-east. TJ took Zeb off to get eyes-on – he should have taken me, from which I inferred that I hadn’t been entirely forgiven. We settled in to wait. It seemed that our exhilarating dash through the hills was going to be followed by a long period of frigid inactivity, and I started to brood on the events of the previous twenty-four hours. It was astonishing to find that it was only this time yesterday that we’d stopped above the village and heard the woman’s wailing cries. But what I thought about most were Ollie’s words after I’d killed the boy in the loft. He’s one of us. I couldn’t get that phrase out of my head. Ollie’s tone had been grudging, yet also faintly gleeful. Why? He was a steadfast, taciturn man and not one for opinions or conjecture. His observation was matter of fact – as if he’d just noticed I was missing a little finger or couldn’t tell my left from my right.
Nor was it the first time someone had made a discomfiting observation about my character. At school I’d been friends with a Nigerian boy called Faisal. Just before supper one day, I’d been summoned to the infirmary. Faisal lay in bed, his right arm in a sling. The powdery smell of clean bandages hung in the air. His face was swollen and purple around both eyes, his mouth bloody.
I didn’t have to ask Faisal who had done this. Boys from the local village often hung around in the lanes bordering the school and yelled insults at the ‘ponces’ as they walked up to the playing fields; two in particular picked on any Africans they could find. After leaving Faisal’s bedside, I climbed the wall that surrounded the school grounds and crossed a field to the bus shelter. There were six of them there. I crouched by a gate a couple of hundred yards up the road and waited. Eventually, the two I was after detached themselves and headed towards me. One was heavily built with a baseball cap pulled down over his doughy forehead; the other was half the size but hard-faced and wiry. I showed myself and watched them approach.
The wiry one got to me first and swung a fist at my jaw. I dodged the blow, seized him by the hair, yanked his head down so that his throat was crushed against the top bar of the gate, and punched him three times in the temple. After the third punch, the boy’s head lolled against the bar. I let him fall and started after the other boy, who was pounding back down the road and would have made it to safety if he hadn’t slipped in a patch of grit. He rolled onto his back and kicked out ineffectually as I ran up. I dropped knees-first into his gut, then drove the point of my elbow into his nose.
The local paper described the attack as ‘brutal’ and the police said they wished to find the ‘perpetrators’ as a matter of urgency – the boys were saying they’d been beaten up by four ponces from the private school, rather than just the one. It saved me from being found out, though my housemaster guessed the truth.
‘This is something you have to watch, James Palatine,’ he told me, a hint of admiration in his eyes. ‘It could get you into very serious trouble.’
Perhaps I’d always been one of us. My head had been so scrambled at the time that Ollie’s words had hardly registered; now, I was eager to show that I was. My actions had been driven not by an involuntary rush of blood, but by some predilection within me that the events of the day had brought to light. I could do it again and again. I was that kind of man.
TJ and Zeb came back and announced that they’d found the anti-aircraft gun. I sent in the coordinates. Mission accomplished. I felt obscurely annoyed that I hadn’t been allowed to take part.
‘In, out, quick as a fuck in a convent,’ said TJ. ‘Any more popguns parked up round here, Jimmy? Those bomber-boys do hate to be shot at.’
He knew there weren’t because he’d asked several times already that day.
‘I’ll check again,’ I said, thinking gloomily that I’d probably be back in my stuffy little apartment in Skopje by dawn. I sent over the coded prompt on my handset and the confirmation came back: no other Serbian units in our area of operation.
‘So, we have time on our hands,’ said TJ. ‘And a little damage needs doing. You with us, Jimmy?’
The green slime epithet had dropped out of their lexicon since I’d rejoined them at the base, but that didn’t mean they trusted me. I looked round and saw I was being closely observed by five men whose eyes were dull with a hunger such as you would not readily volunteer to see sated.
‘What kind of damage?’
‘You wouldn’t know anything about this if I had my way,’ said TJ, ‘but the girls here reckon you’ve got the right, seeing as you saved Azza’s life – albeit he didn’t live long afterwards.’
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 4
