Wind stirred the polythene sheets. In another room, someone was screaming. Llewelyn stepped over the bodies, taping the scene from the other angle, a simple wide shot. This, he knew, was the very heart of the film, the closest he’d ever get to what had happened to James Jordan. Back in London, he’d find experts who’d defend the use of mines. They’d come from one of the military think-tanks, the Institute for Strategic Studies maybe, or even the Ministry of Defence. They’d talk about the pressures of the modern battlefield and the need to maintain a full inventory of weapons. They’d doubtless point out that mines could be used responsibly, in accordance with some UN protocol or other. They’d be articulate and immensely grave, but none of their careful rationales could possibly stand up to footage like this.
Llewelyn paused, picking out a woman by the window. Her head was turned towards the wall and as the polythene stopped moving in the wind Llewelyn could hear her moaning softly, one hand outstretched, the fingers tightening with pain. In truth, he’d no idea whether these people were all mine casualties but in the context of what had just happened to Domingos, it wouldn’t matter. The story was so strong, the images were so powerful, that no one would bother asking. This was the reality, they’d think. This was where kids like James Jordan could so easily end up.
Llewelyn lowered the camcorder and went through to the next room. The screaming had started again and there were more bodies on the floor. Crouched beside them was a young nurse. She had a baby’s bottle in her hand and she was trying to tease the teat into an old man’s mouth. The old man had no visible injuries but Llewelyn had never seen anyone thinner.
‘Domingos?’
The girl looked up and indicated the door. Llewelyn nodded. At the end of a corridor, Llewelyn found another room. The door was ajar. He could hear the murmur of voices, a foreign language he didn’t immediately recognise, something Scandinavian. He stepped inside. Domingos lay on a wooden table, naked. By his head stood a middle-aged Angolan woman. The sleeve of her dress had been rolled up and from her right arm a tube carried blood to an empty one-litre Coke bottle on the floor. With her other arm, she was cradling Domingos’s head, singing to him very softly, her lips barely moving, the words of the song scarcely audible.
Llewelyn stared at her for a moment, the camera forgotten. Then a white face looked round at him, one of the two men working on Domingos’s wounds. He had a saw in one hand and the remains of the Angolan’s right leg in the other. Seeing Llewelyn raise the camera, he hesitated a moment and then returned to work with a shrug. Llewelyn heard the rasp of the saw against bone, and Domingos began to yell again, a raw animal howl of pain. Llewelyn tried to steady the camcorder. A corner of the polythene at the window had been lifted to let in light and there were flies everywhere. Llewelyn tightened the shot a little more until it was almost abstract, scarlet muscle, yellowish streaks of fat, and the startling white of exposed bone.
One of the surgeons was talking now and it was a second or two before Llewelyn realised that the question was addressed to him.
‘My friend, what are you doing?’
The accent was heavy. One of the Oslo mob, Llewelyn thought. One of the young doctors Peterson had mentioned from Norwegian People’s Aid. The question came again and Llewelyn explained he was making a film for English television.
‘About what?’
‘Mines,’ Llewelyn said at once, ‘and all this.’
‘Ja?’
The surgeon looked up again. He was wearing a blue checked shirt and jeans. His only concession to surgical procedure was a pair of blood-wet rubber gloves.
‘You want me to talk? For this film of yours?’
Llewelyn nodded, easing back on the zoom. The gloves appeared. Then the hacksaw.
‘OK, what we do now is pretty simple. We take off the leg, so, as high as possible.’ He indicated the cut he was making, a line across Domingos’s thigh at least three inches above the knee. ‘Otherwise we have to come back and do it again. So. There you have it.’
The saw bit into the bone. The other surgeon was having trouble keeping Domingos still.
‘You’ve given him painkillers?’
‘Vodka.’
‘No painkillers?’
‘Vodka.’
The saw was almost through now. Domingos was moaning.
‘And what happens afterwards?’
‘We do the other leg.’
‘Take it off?’
‘No, reset the bone.’
‘And the rest of him? His face? His arm?’
‘Not a problem. Minor injuries. Superficial.’
The sawing stopped and the surgeon separated the two ends of the bone. Then he began to sever the remaining tendrils of muscle and tendon, pausing now and again to pincer out tiny fragments of jagged dark green plastic. He held one up, giving Llewelyn time to focus.
‘Even with X-rays we wouldn’t find these.’ He let the shrapnel fall into a bowl at his elbow and then he lowered his eye to the exposed stump of Domingos’s thigh, probing in the pulp for more debris. Mines, he explained, were designed to blast stuff upwards, deep into the legs. It might be anything: soil, grass, sand, bits of shoe leather, fragments of denim from a pair of jeans. Once, he’d even found a complete buckle from someone’s sandal. Unfortunately, all this took time. Which is why, he mused, they’d probably invented mines in the first place. One man injured. Two or three to carry him away. And a complete surgical team, occupied for hours, trying to clean him up.
‘Clever,’ he murmured, ‘don’t you think?’
He glanced at his colleague and a bottle of mineral water appeared. The other doctor opened it and the surgeon began to pour it over Domingos’s stump, wondering aloud about the Angolan’s chances of resisting infection. If they were very lucky, the wound might heal. If it didn’t, they’d have to return time and again until all the dying flesh had been excised away.
‘We call it salami,’ he said, raising the bottle to his lips and swallowing the last of the water, ‘because we take a slice at a time.’
He glanced round, wiping his mouth with his arm, offering the camera a tired smile. Under the heavy growth of beard he looked exhausted. Finally he called for a bucket and Llewelyn followed his left hand with the camcorder as he picked up the lower half of Domingos’s leg and then wrapped it in newspaper. The bundle of moist newsprint disappeared into the bucket and Llewelyn had a sudden image of the dog, one floor down, still asleep beside the gaping hole in the wall.
The surgeon was talking to the woman now, switching to Portuguese. Llewelyn panned slowly along the line of Domingos’s body until he found her face.
‘Who is she?’ he asked, interrupting the conversation.
The surgeon looked round again. He was in the process of extracting the drip from her arm and sealing the puncture wound with a square of Sellotape.
‘She’s this man’s wife,’ he said. ‘Her name is Celestina.’
McFaul got to the hospital forty minutes later. He’d tried to raise Christianne on the radio but in the end he’d given up, crossing the city on foot. Outside the hospital, he spotted the Global Land Rover. Llewelyn was sitting behind the wheel, his head back against the seat, his eyes closed. McFaul pulled the door open, shaking him roughly by the arm.
‘What happened?’
Llewelyn opened one eye. His face looked grey and his body was hunched, like a man trying to keep warm. He looked at McFaul, uncomprehending.
‘Accident,’ he said at last. ‘He had an accident.’
‘Yeah, but how? Why?’
Llewelyn looked at him, puzzled, then shook his head.
‘Third floor,’ he said, ‘room at the end.’
‘Is he bad?’
‘Very.’
‘Shit.’
McFaul slammed the door, telling Llewelyn to wait, then limped across towards the apartment block. As he began to mount the stairs he heard the cackle of the Land Rover’s engine and the clunk as Llewelyn engaged gear. He hesitated a moment, wonderi
ng whether to go back, then decided against it.
Domingos was up on the third floor, unconscious now, still in the hands of the surgeons. A single glance told McFaul everything he wanted to know. The heavy Kevlar waistcoat had shielded his upper body from serious damage, and most of his face looked OK, but below the waist he was a mess. The stump of his right thigh was heavily bandaged and the two Norwegians were bent over his other leg.
Above the knee, a gaping entry wound had been cleaned with swabs and packed with dressings and now the surgeons were trying to drill a fixing rod through muscle and bone. They were using an old hand-drill, rusty and squeaking, and the rod kept slipping as it made contact with the bone. After a while, the sharp end of the rod began to grind through the bone and McFaul watched as the rod finally emerged through the flesh on the other side of Domingos’s thigh. He’d seen similar operations in Cambodia. With the rod through the bone, the surgeons would be able to apply traction, using weights to realign the splintered ends of bone either side of the fracture. The procedure would take weeks but with luck Domingos might be able to regain the use of at least one leg.
McFaul edged carefully past the surgeons, exchanging nods. He knew these men well. He’d drunk with them often, sharing their appetite for good vodka and an hour or two of oblivion. Beside Domingos’s head, he paused. The injuries to his neck and chin weren’t as bad as they looked and his breathing seemed regular enough. McFaul touched the Angolan’s cheek with the back of his hand, wondering how long it would be before he regained consciousness. The pain would be indescribable, and with it would come the realisation that his life had changed for ever.
McFaul brushed away the flies, remembering the early days of his own convalescence. At first he’d been numbed, refusing to accept the reality of what had happened. Then he’d been plunged into weeks of the blackest despair, resigned to spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Only later, fuelled by a deep anger, had he resolved to put his life back into some kind of working order. McFaul bent to Domingos again, his mouth to the little man’s ear, wishing him luck. The job would still be there. He’d make sure of that. But the wild evenings of backyard football were probably over.
The surgeons were cleaning up now. One of them indicated a small, jagged triangle of plastic, lying in a chipped saucer beside a pile of bloodied swabs. McFaul ignored it.
‘How is he?’
The bigger of the two men shrugged, pouring mineral water over his rubber gloves and then putting them carefully aside for the next operation.
‘OK. Normally he’d make it, no problem, but …’ he gestured round, ‘this isn’t normal.’
‘We’ll take him out. On the evacuation flight.’
‘Sure. He should be OK till then. Not comfortable. But alive.’ He produced a pair of forceps and lifted the shrapnel from the saucer. ‘That’s the biggest bit we found.’
McFaul studied it a moment. It was smaller than the corner of a postage stamp, part of the mine’s plastic casing, designed to blast apart into a thousand tiny fragments. It was a dark mottled green and the edges were razor-sharp to the touch.
The surgeon was cleaning his glasses on a corner of his shirt.
‘What do you think?’
‘Could be anything. Anti-personnel, certainly, but what kind?’ McFaul shrugged, returning the shrapnel. ‘Impossible to tell.’
He paused, looking down at Domingos, struck by a sudden thought.
‘You need blood?’ he said.
The surgeon shook his head.
‘His wife gave a litre. Same group. Should be enough.’
‘Celestina? Here?’
‘Next door,’ the surgeon nodded, ‘helping us out.’
McFaul found Celestina sitting on the floor of what had once been the apartment’s tiny kitchen. She was knotting lengths of torn sheet, her back against the wall. On a nearby chair was a pillowcase and a pile of small rocks. McFaul knelt beside her and put his arm round her shoulders. Like Domingos, she spoke good English.
‘He’ll be OK,’ he said at once. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’
Celestina eyed him, unconvinced. She was a big, handsome, ample woman, a head taller than Domingos, and so far she’d weathered the siege with stoic good humour. She’d lost her home, and most of her possessions, but she was camping with relatives, determined to keep her family together. Domingos had been at the very heart of all that – energetic, cheerful, tireless – and McFaul knew how much the little man had meant to her. She’d always called him ‘cabritito’, my baby kid goat, and the phrase had exactly captured Domingos’s spirit, his playfulness, his boundless appetite for whatever each new day might bring. Working with the man had been a joy. Marriage, thought McFaul, would have been no different.
‘We’ll fly you out,’ he said. ‘There’ll be room for you all.’
‘Where to?’
‘Luanda.’ He nodded, trying to coax a smile. ‘Benguela. Wherever.’
‘We belong here.’
‘You’ll be back, I promise.’
Celestina looked at him, not believing a word, and McFaul squeezed her hand, knowing only too well what she feared. Amputees were bad karma. You saw them everywhere in the cities, begging in the street, lurching through the morning traffic jams, insensible with drink. To lose a leg was to risk joining these derelicts, scraping a life from the very edges of a society already on the point of disintegration. The UN, as ever, had a phrase for it, a neat little acronym. Amputees were EVIs. EVI stood for Extremely Vulnerable Individual. Just now, in Angola, they numbered 15,000.
McFaul rocked back on his heels. Celestina had finished with the sheets and now she was filling the pillowcase with rocks.
‘What are you doing?’
‘This is for the doctors. For Domingos. They’ve put something through his leg. They say they need weights.’ She gestured at the sagging pillowcase. ‘I make this for them.’
McFaul nodded. Tie one end of the knotted sheets to the rod through Domingos’s thigh, tie the other to the pillowcase and suspend the rocks over some kind of frame, and the shattered bone should realign.
‘I’ll get him back here,’ he said again. ‘He’s too valuable to lose. He’s learned too much. The war will end one day. The war will be over.’
Celestina shook her head. Next door, the surgeons were manhandling Domingos off the table, cursing in Norwegian as something fell to the floor.
‘He’s very bad,’ she said. ‘Very bad.’
‘He’ll get better.’
‘You think so?’
‘I know it.’
The surgeons appeared in the corridor. They were carrying Domingos between them, shuffling past. The bandage on his amputated stump was already dark with blood. Celestina couldn’t take her eyes off it. The corridor empty again, she put her head between her knees and began to sob. McFaul tried to comfort her but he could feel at once how cold she’d become, and how remote. Reassurance was useless. It was far too late for that. At length she turned her head sideways, simple accusation.
‘You always said you’d look after him,’ she whispered. ‘You always said he’d come home safe.’
By the time McFaul got back to the schoolhouse, Bennie had returned. He was lying on his camp-bed in the half-darkness, his eyes open, staring up at the sagging plasterboard. On the partition beside the wall, McFaul could just make out the solemn faces of his kids, three passport photos Blu-Tacked beneath a colour poster of the ’92–’93 West Ham football team.
McFaul slumped against the wall across the room, his left leg stretched out, trying to ease the pain in his stump. Walking back from the hospital, he’d been trying yet again to work out how the accident had happened. Must have been a mistake on Domingos’s part. Must have been.
Bennie was looking at him now, his face turned on the pillow.
‘How is he?’
McFaul described Domingos’s injuries. With luck, they might save one leg. Then he fell silent again. Celestina, he thought. And her little sack o
f rocks.
‘You should have fucking checked him,’ he said at last.
‘I did.’
‘Double-checked him.’
‘I did. I told you, boss, on the radio. He had the notes. He showed them to me. Shit, you were only there a couple of days back. Four? Five days?’
‘Sunday,’ McFaul said briefly. ‘Nearly a week.’
‘Yeah, but what’s a week? You don’t forget these things. You don’t. He knew exactly how much he’d done. It was down there on paper. He’d entered it into the laptop, too. Black and white. Check, if you want.’
McFaul nodded, falling silent, picturing the minefield. He’d need a print-out from the laptop for the inquiry. Middleton would insist.
‘So how far had he gone?’
‘Fifty metres. Sixty. Absolute max.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Fucking don’t then. Only it’s true.’ Bennie sounded aggrieved, turning his face to the wall. Seconds later, he rolled over again. ‘What about a stray? A rogue? One you missed last week?’
McFaul didn’t answer. The same thought had been haunting him since the first conversation with Bennie on the radio. If it wasn’t a fault on Domingos’s part, if he was still within the safe area, then maybe he’d stumbled on a mine they hadn’t found before. He closed his eyes, examining the possibility afresh, trying to take himself back to the afternoon they’d last worked on the path to the river. It had been hot, hotter than usual. Peterson had arrived on a flight from Luanda. They’d had a brief discussion about the boy Jordan. Peterson had wanted a sight of the field report he was putting in. They’d been talking on the embankment while Domingos took the final turn. McFaul shook his head, swamped by a sudden wave of remorse, remembering the little figure out on the bare, red earth, diligent as ever, sweeping left and right, interlocking arcs, textbook stuff, nothing left to chance. No, if they were talking human error then the fault was more likely his own.
The Perfect Soldier Page 24
