by Melanie Finn
She was someone else now. Strebel felt a yearning of schoolboy intensity to find her after all. To love her. To hold her and kiss her face. He began to weep, silently, his back to the empty café. There was so much sadness locked inside him. He could weep forever and not be done.
At last he stood and wiped his face and paid the bill. He walked back to the precinct the long way, beside the river. A woman with a baby was feeding the ducks. He’d arrested her a few years ago for possession of cocaine. He watched her for a long time, the baby’s blonde hair in the sun, her squeals of glee. He moved on, quickly out of her sight. He met people on the worst days of their lives, and they never forgave him.
This thought made him seize up. All he did was make people sad, ruin their lives, tell them: your child has died, your husband is being held for questioning, nothing will be as it was. His efforts were merely mitigations. He didn’t really put anything right, make anything better.
He pulled out his phone, dialed. He could not speak right away.
‘Paul?’ Ingrid said. ‘Paul? Can you hear me?’
He opened his mouth, but still there were no words.
‘Paul,’ she said again with a touch of irritation. And that made him flinch. He almost hung up.
But then he said, ‘Ingrid.’ Her name like a handhold in the rock, so that he felt compelled to say it again to make sure it was real, that it held fast. ‘Ingrid.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll pass by the supermarket on the way home. Do we need anything?’
She did not answer right away, unsure what this unaccustomed offer meant. Never, even before they were married, had he spoken to her like this. The supermarket? He left the housekeeping to her, his socks on the floor, the bed unmade. She was almost afraid: things were as they were between them; she was not ready for change, but she had felt the shift for some time. Was he ill? Was there another woman?
‘Butter,’ she said with a sudden burst of courage and strange hope. ‘And a dozen eggs.’
MARTIN MARTINS
Fucking Franco had insisted. He’d surprised me by being interested in the crap that passed for cultural heritage in Congo. But then, who was I to judge culture? We have some nice nuclear power plants in Ukraine. He said, ‘Listen up, dickhead, there’s a war on and these people are still dancing.’
‘What people?’ I said. ‘There’s no one. It’s fucking creepy.’
That’s how it was: no people. Not an old man sitting under a tree, not a woman with a bucket on her head, not even a fucking goat. We drove through the forest. Massive, dark trees, total silence. Some Italian journalists had gone missing right there a couple of weeks before.
The forest, man, it was not a normal forest. Not even like a jungle with monkeys and colored birds. A jungle, you feel there’s life, creepy, crawly life that you definitely do not want to step on. But this forest was a bad dream; it was all wrong. There was a road, a good road, and yet no people, no one chopping down the trees. No sacks of charcoal for sale. I mean, maybe you don’t know how weird that is unless you’ve been around the Dark Incontinent long enough.
When I was a kid I had a dream and I woke up to find everyone was gone, my mum, my pops, Uncle Mink, the whole family. I ran outside, but everyone had gone, the whole village, the birds, the cows, even the mangy dogs. And then I saw that the houses were getting up and running away. The trees were running away, their roots like legs. And I knew that whatever was coming was so terrible that all these things knew they had to get the fuck out.
That’s what the forest was like.
After a dozen miles we came to a village. Again, no one.
‘Franco,’ I said. ‘This is a bad idea. Who the fuck told you there was dancing?’
‘The waiter,’ Franco said. He was trying to be cool, but his lip was starting to twitch. His lip hadn’t been the same, in fact Franco had not been the same, since that shit in Juba.
‘The waiter?’ I had to say, because I really was incredulous. We were here in the middle of a fucking war zone looking for a dance because of a waiter’s say-so. A waiter in the last hotel on earth. Amazing, really, he had this starched white uniform, blinding white with fancy red and gold epaulets and shiny brass buttons. It was beautifully laundered. And then he had shorts, these old ripped-up shorts and sandals made from car tires. He spoke perfect English. Franco said he’d been a teacher before the war came and the rebels burnt down the school and all the children in it, including his own two boys.
Franco stopped the car and we got out. There were some empty buildings, most without roofs or windows. I glanced inside and saw a big splotch of red and what looked like a dress in the middle of it. But no body. Nobody at all.
The rebels had drawn on the side of the buildings. Their names—indecipherable, except for a clever scribe called REMY J. Remy J had also assembled enough letters to write ‘Fuck’ and ‘Kill.’ Sometimes people spell ‘Fuck’ without the ‘c’ or ‘Kill’ with only one ‘l’ but Remy J could spell. Perhaps the waiter had been his teacher. I don’t know if Remy or one of his colleagues had drawn the guns, and what I supposed was a vagina.
Franco put up his hand, and then a finger to his lips. He was standing very still. I listened. There it was, the very faintest sound, so you could easily confuse it with your own heartbeat. Drums.
‘The natives are restless,’ Franco said.
We took the safeties off our Glocks and crept toward the drums. The culture we’d come for. The beating led us like a thread through the burnt-out village. I was pining for a chicken, just to see a stupid chicken run out of a hut puck-pucking. But, man, there wasn’t even a fly.
Just beyond the village, the ground fell on its knees, a sharp drop into a korongo where once there was a waterhole for cattle but now it was just a dry pan. A massive dust devil was hurling about, and the drumming was in the middle of it. It took us a moment to figure out that the dust came from the dancers.
They were all kitted out in masks, their feet stamping up the earth as they prowled and shook. They weren’t singing, they weren’t making any noise, there was just the sound of the drum. The dust cleared in brief moments so we could see the drummer in the middle, some old guy hammering hammering on a big cowskin drum with his big pink-palmed hands. And then the dust would occlude him again, and the dancers would be coming in and out of it, so we were seeing and not seeing.
I cannot deny that the sound of the drum, the pounding of it, went right into me and fucked with my heart, like the rhythm was just similar enough that my heart was all excited to have found a soulmate, but it was a seduction, because the drumbeat was just a fraction off, and it made my heartbeat change. Something was going on inside me, something was shifting about.
Also, WTF were these people doing here dancing and carrying on? Clearly, bad things had happened quite recently. And yet they were dancing.
Franco looked uncomfortable, too, shifting his weight like he had very bad indigestion, which he got after Juba. ‘You happy now?’ I turned back toward the village. ‘Can we go?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Fine. I’ll wait at the car.’
Everything was all wrong. I knew absolutely that everything was all wrong and would therefore get more wrong. We should not have been there, we should have turned around in the middle of that goddamn creepy forest and gone back to the hotel and had the teacher bring us beers. This wasn’t our war. Any more.
I was not at all surprised to find four gentlemen standing around the car. Draping themselves like male models in Ukrainian Vogue over the open door, the hood, one posing in the side-view mirror. They had the mirrored shades and the camo gear, bits of it scavenged along the way, the bandanas, the AKs. I’ve noticed that the fashion sense of rebels hasn’t evolved since the early nineties. They’ve missed the whole gangsta baggy trouser thing. But, having your trousers around your ass maybe doesn’t work when you’ve got looting, burning and killing to do.
The leader of the foursome stepped forward and I noti
ced his Italian loafers right away.
‘Good day. How are you?’ I figured this was Remy J.
‘Fine,’ I said, although he wasn’t really asking. ‘And you?’
‘I keel you. Quick if you pay. Slow if you do not.’
‘Can you kill my friend first?’
Remy J laughed. They all laughed. I laughed. I love Africa, you can make a joke about anything and it will actually be funny. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘You like to watch?’
‘Oh, definitely.’
Two of them went away and in only a few minutes came back with Franco. They were chatting and smoking cigarettes. ‘So, they’re going to kill us,’ Franco said, offering me one.
‘I didn’t know you’d started smoking again,’ I said, taking one.
‘This pisses me off. I was enjoying the drumming.’
‘Where do you want us?’ I asked Remy J.
‘First, you pay for quick keel.’
‘Of course.’ Franco and I handed him our wallets. There was a couple of hundred dollars. He seemed satisfied. Then pointed to a wall about twenty yards away from the car. This had a number of bullet holes in it, and rust-colored smudges, like kids had been playing paintball. Only they hadn’t.
Franco shook his head. ‘No, no, that’s not right. The light is terrible.’
Remy squinted. ‘The light?’
‘I was hoping you could take a photograph.’
‘Of your keeling?’
‘Sure,’ nodded Franco. He took out his iPhone. ‘Would you mind?’
Remy gestured to one of his mates. The mate took the iPhone and Franco showed him how to take a picture. We positioned ourselves against the wall close to the car, put our arms around each other and said ‘Cheese!’ We ended up taking a bunch of photos with Remy and the others, smiling, joking around. Remy had a real talent for posing.
But when Franco put two fingers behind Remy’s head like bunny ears, he got serious. He gestured for the phone, and Franco sighed and started to hand it over.
Then, as if he wanted to be incredibly helpful to this fucking coon who was going to kill us, Franco said: ‘Hey, man, I gotta unlock it for you. Disable the security code. Or you won’t be able to use it.’
‘Thanks,’ Remy said and handed the phone back.
Franco pressed a code into the keypad.
DAH DAH DAH DAH DAH! BLAM BLAM!
Wagner. Sound of gunfire. DOOSH DOOSH. A crazy mad storm like a million bullets and people screaming AAAAHHHH with a couple of Apache choppers coming in TUKKA TUKKA and some explosions DOOSH PSSEWWWW DOOOSHH. Incoming!!! Franco and I jumped in the car while Remy and his crew dived for cover.
They were completely freaked out.
‘Wahoo!’ said Franco, flooring the Cruiser as we got the hell out of there.
We drove for three minutes before we started laughing. Franco reached over and squeezed my cheek. ‘You are a genius!’
The recording had been my idea, sound clips scavenged from Apocalypse Now and a couple of episodes of Band of Brothers. We hadn’t tried it until now.
Let me tell you, we thought we were shit-hot, so clever. And then the car started going fug-fug-fug. One of those cunts had managed to hit the carburetor.
‘Shit, shit, shit.’
We were maybe fourteen miles from the hotel and in the middle of that fucking forest. We got out and started jogging. If we were lucky Remy J would give up on us. If we weren’t he’d be coming after us. We hadn’t seen another vehicle, but even on foot those guys were younger than us and they were pissed off. Because not everyone can take a joke.
Franco and I, we were not aging well. Smoking is terrible for lungs and all the burning tires we’d inhaled in Tripoli and tear gas in Kinshasa. Franco’s guts hadn’t been put back in very well in Juba; there was still a big tear in his abdominal muscles. And I still had that bullet in my lower spine.
There was not a breath of wind, not even the sound of leaves rustling. Like the trees were not real, but some kind of painted set. Something Stalin would come up with, a pretty field or village street, and then behind it piles of bodies, most of my baburya’s family. I kept listening and it was so crazy not to hear anything. We walked because we couldn’t run any more. I was just tired, I really couldn’t be bothered, like being out in the snow, that feeling you just want to lie down and go to sleep. I almost said to Franco that we should just give up, what did we really care about living?
Then we heard the bicycle bell, a bright little brriiing! We ducked into the trees. Fucking Remy was on a bicycle. They were all on bicycles, the four cyclists of the apocalypse. We stayed low and very still until they passed. But they were looking for us, they knew we weren’t far, they were trying to smell us. Franco and I crept away, deeper into the forest.
We walked east, for no reason other than that it was away from the road and Remy, and we needed to pick a steady direction. We walked until it was too dark. We had to stop because the canopy of trees was so thick we couldn’t see the stars. Of course, if we still had Franco’s iPhone, we could have used the compass app. What a fucking genius.
After three days of walking we were not doing well at all—that fucking forest—and when that third night came we were thinking we were done. Franco, especially. But then we saw a light. Just one little point of light. And we started on, losing the light for a moment or two as we staggered on through the trees.
Finally, we came upon an old mission, a big stone house in a wide clearing. A low wall was more a landscaping feature than serious defense. The gate was open. Anyone could go in. So we went in. There were a number of kerosene lamps in the courtyard and we could therefore see the people here, families, and I wondered why we hadn’t heard them further out, because it was quite a din: women cooking and talking, children crying or laughing. I listened to the other sounds, a wooden spoon on a tin plate, bare feet on straw mats, coughing. I felt like crying because my ears were aching from the lack of sound.
No one gave us a second glance. We carried on up the stone steps and into the mission. A crusty old nun came out in a bathrobe. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said, taking Franco’s hand and leading him into a living room. ‘Oh, dear, dear, dear.’ As Franco sat down, she nodded to a young boy: ‘You’d better get the doctor.’
*
To be honest, I did not remember. Certainly, when I saw her, when she walked in, she was not a woman I would recognize or even notice. I wasn’t even sure she was a woman. Her hair was cut very short and she was wearing baggy clothes. And the light was very dim.
She was gentle with Franco. She felt his abdomen and took his pulse. She made him comfortable on the sofa. ‘I don’t have an IV,’ she said. ‘We’re completely out.’ She held a glass of water to his lips and he took a couple of sips. He looked pretty fucked up and I could see when he lay down that his belly was swollen. She plumped his pillow, then took a wet cloth and washed his face.
She turned to me. For a very brief moment her eyes met mine and I thought I saw something more than professional concern. I had no idea what it might be. She had a basin of water and began washing my face.
‘No,’ I pushed her away. ‘I can do it.’
I woke up in the night and she was there, sitting in a chair.
‘What is this place?’
‘A refuge.’
The moon came through the window onto her face and I saw a certain beauty there.
‘A refuge? There’s a war. They’ll just come here and kill you. Kill all these people. There’s no refuge.’
‘Do you have a cigarette?’
I sat up and gave her one.
‘Sister Mary doesn’t like me smoking.’
‘Least of her troubles,’ I said. And laughed.
‘That’s right,’ she said.
‘What? What’s right?’
‘Nothing.’ She took another drag, but there was a smile on her lips.
I watched her. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m a medic. I was with an MSF convoy that was att
acked near the mountains. Everyone was killed except me. I ended up here.’
‘When was that?’
‘A year ago.’
Oh, shit, I nearly said. Because I remembered me and Franco, and it had certainly been a fuck up. The wrong coordinates, an error, really. Instead I said, ‘What’s the point?’
‘The point?’
I noticed her hands, they were really quite lovely though worn and rough from the sun.
‘Yeah, the point. The people out there, the children. I mean, you save them for how long? It’s not like their lives were great even before this particular shit storm.’
‘There is no point,’ she said. ‘It’s what you make of it anyway.’
‘Then why the fuck bother?’
‘Listen,’ she said, turning her head toward a sound. It was still far off, but closing in. The cheerful briiing of a bicycle bell.
She knew what it was, same as me, but she didn’t freak out. She kept smoking.
‘Pilgrim,’ I said, because it came to me.
She looked at me. ‘Yes, Martin.’
‘I know this one. It doesn’t have a good ending.’
She put out the cigarette, stood and wiped her hands on her trousers, an automatic gesture, because they were definitely not dirty. She walked into the courtyard. The sun was just coming up and the women were boiling kettles and the children, most of them were still sleeping. Pilgrim walked among them and they knew her. They offered her tea. Beyond them, under an acacia, was a Land Rover, an old 109, in pretty good shape, and so easy to hotwire.
She went out the gate. Remy J and the others were coming up the road. They stopped their bicycles and got off. Remy started talking to her, gesticulating. Though I couldn’t hear his words, it was clear he was very, extremely pissed off. She stood quite still in the tall shadow of him, and as there was no point in running away, no point at all, she raised her arm to shade her face from the rising sun.
I looked again at the 109.
