Borderlines

by Michela Wrong

  ‘That is what happened, isn’t it?’ I wanted my instincts confirmed.

  He snorted contemptuously. ‘This award comes trailing clouds of stale cigar smoke. I’d be surprised if the documents don’t have circles of dried brandy on them. The gentlemen’s club that thinks it runs the world and knows what’s best for the rest of us met late one night and came up with a bullies’ charter. I guess it’s a habit they just can’t break.’

  ‘Abraham asked if we were going to appeal.’

  ‘Well, officially we can’t, of course. Binding arbitration, and all that. But one way or another, we’ll have to throw a spanner in the works.’

  He rose and began to pace the room, weaving a nimble path around a discarded sock, a laptop and a pile of plates, occasionally twitching the curtains to stare at the street below. ‘We can’t let an award of this legal incoherence stand. Tribunals, commissions, can’t unilaterally decide what falls within their jurisdiction: that way madness lies. And, besides, I’ve got a hell of a lot of evidence now establishing a pattern of steady territorial encroachment over the years that needs to see the light of day. So … let me think,’ he muttered. ‘You and I will go through that ruling with a fine-tooth comb, identifying every legal inconsistency and contradiction, however minute. There won’t be any shortage, believe me. We’ll need to have our killer response ready before we fly back to Lira.’

  This conversation could not be avoided any longer.

  ‘I can’t go back to Lira, Winston. I have to resign.’

  He swirled round from where he stood at the window. I think it was the first time I’d ever surprised him. For a moment, it felt like an achievement, to have succeeded in nonplussing the great Winston Peabody III.

  ‘Perhaps it’s time you told me what exactly happened on your way over.’

  I sat on the office bed, taking it slowly. ‘There’s no point going into the details. But I was asked by someone in Lira for a favour that involved breaking the law, and I agreed.’

  ‘Why?’

  A childishly simple question. And, as with all children’s questions, the hardest to answer.

  ‘I don’t really know. I was angry. I find I still care desperately about the case but I don’t care for my clients. In fact, they repel me. Is that a contradiction? Or just an irrelevant emotion I’m supposed to brush aside? I don’t know any more. I didn’t expect this to happen. In any case, I violated all sorts of professional codes of conduct, risked discrediting you and the office, and I’m really sorry for all of that. Really sorry. But I have to resign. My detention at the airport was just a warning, a rap across the knuckles. They’re on to me. Someone ratted on me, and now I can’t go back.’

  ‘Is Dawit behind this?’

  I must have looked astonished. ‘I really don’t want to talk about it,’ I stammered. The possibility had never occurred to me. There was a much more obvious candidate, by my reckoning, for the role of informer. The man who had arranged the original exchange.

  His face had gone as tight as a nut. ‘Since you’re hugging so much to your chest, my dear Paula, maybe you could tell me whether what you’ve done also makes it impossible for the rest of us to keep operating as a legal team. Do we, too, risk detention at the airport when we return? It would be helpful to know. I’m not too bothered about us expatriates, but Abraham, Ismael, Ribqa and the others have families to support.’

  I bowed my head, accepting his reproof as my due. ‘I’ve thought about this, but I think it’s very personal, very specific. There’s been no raid on the office. I think they knew exactly who they were going for.’

  ‘I’m very angry with you. Very angry.’ His voice was as thick as tar and his face so pale it had taken on a ghoulish, greenish tinge. In the penumbra, his eyes had the dark gleam of obsidian. ‘I’ve never needed your help more than now. So far there’s been no talk of claims for war damages, but we can expect that now, and the other side will go for the jugular. Razed villages, flattened factories, stripped businesses, gang-raped virgins, stolen goats, barbecued cattle, lost sandals – there won’t be a claim that won’t be quintupled, exaggerated and hyped, with the Americans, the UN and the Scandies playing a plaintive violin serenade from the sidelines. And the world’s press won’t have any trouble deciding who to believe now that they’ve been so helpfully served up with a B-movie villain. And this, this,’ he boomed, as he bounced his fist so hard against the window I feared the glass would shatter, ‘is the moment you choose to go rogue?’

  He was panting, his thin chest rising and falling. In the offices across the street, I could see workers looking up from their desks, alerted by the pounding, gazing at us in alarm.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Winston. I didn’t anticipate any of this. Until two hours ago I was convinced we would win it all. And then you wouldn’t have needed me in any case.’

  He jerked his head away from me and stared into the middle distance. ‘I was always afraid of this,’ he muttered. ‘I feared something like this from the start. You were close to tears that morning we met in Boston. Too emotional, too passionate. I needed your brain, your crunchy, rigorous, muscular brain, not your passion. But I suppose at the end of the day you were looking for a cause, just like all my puppy-dog students. Something to cling to, because you can’t forgive yourself for not clinging harder to your boyfriend when you had the chance.’

  I glared at him with hatred. During all our intimate working sessions, our overnight flights and eccentric, married-couple meals, Jake’s name had never once passed my lips. Knowing that Dan had provided the bare bones of the story, I had never burdened Winston with it further, more out of pride than modesty. How dare he now fling it in my face?

  ‘And, what, I’m the only romantic in the room? Have you looked at yourself recently, Winston? Don’t you realise how deep you’re in? Don’t you ever stop to wonder what it must be like to be a citizen of the country whose case you’re fighting with such determination? Have you read what Amnesty said in its last report about your adopted country? Seen how the government performs on the Press Freedom Index? Yes, it’s at the bottom, last out of a hundred and seventy-eight countries.’

  ‘You think any of that’s new to me?’ His look was one of total contempt.

  ‘Is that why you became a lawyer? Does this summon up the ghost of Martin Luther King? Don’t you ever feel a teensy bit uneasy at the thought that you’ve become the attack dog for a president regarded as an international pariah?’

  ‘That’s just a lazy label applied by diplomats who can’t be bothered to think. There’s never been a time when He couldn’t explain his actions in a way that morally satisfied me. He just doesn’t wrap it up in the hypocritical protestations required by the West. Maybe that’s where you and I simply part ideological company, Paula. Your skin colour means you can’t even see the hegemonic status quo, let alone challenge it. As a black man, I know what it’s like to operate in a system that’s stacked against you.’

  I slapped my hand to my forehead in exasperation. ‘Jesus fucking Christ, Winston, do you realise that in all this time I’ve never once heard you say his name? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone in Lira say it, and you’re just as bad as the rest of them. It’s always “He”, “Him”, with a capital H. You all tiptoe around it like it’s sacred ground. Are you afraid of turning into a pillar of salt or something? What exactly is he, in your eyes? Rather more than just an employer, I’d say, more like Lord of Lords, God of Gods.’

  There was a sudden rap on the door. We both stood in silence, then Winston went to open it and muttered something quietly reassuring to the hotel employee on the other side. Then he put his back against it, heaved a long sigh and turned to me. ‘You were shouting quite loud, Paula.’

  The interruption had calmed us both. My rage was drying up. But I could not resist one last jab. ‘You may not care about the morality of it, Winston, but I’m surprised, quite honestly, that your instinct for professional self-survival doesn’t kick in. I get the odd email whi
sper of what your colleagues back in Washington say about you, you know, and it isn’t pretty. Defending He Who Must Be Obeyed isn’t going to do your career much good, long-term.’

  He guffawed. ‘Long-term? I don’t have a long term, Paula. I’m seventy-five years old. I’ve got a minor amphetamine habit and I’m in the early stages of prostate cancer – not something that will kill me but which whittles relentlessly away at my energy levels. This is my last hurrah.’

  I gaped. Winston had always seemed somehow ageless, a man I struggled to imagine dark-haired and smooth-skinned, someone born mature. I had always assumed him to have years to go before official retirement. And how had I missed the implications of all those pill bottles on his bathroom shelf? ‘Seventy-five? I don’t seem to recall that on your official bio.’

  He shrugged. ‘Some details are best glossed over. You reach a point in our culture where no advantage accrues with the advancing years. Consultancies dry up – you get passed over in favour of former interns. I’ve been somewhere in my sixties for at least ten years now,’ he said, with a bitter laugh.

  I had never heard him speak like that before. The imperturbable, unassailable Winston Peabody III, faking his age and popping uppers like an anxious soap star.

  And as though it was determined to confirm his words, my mind immediately started racing back to key episodes of the case, reinterpreting them in the light of this new information. His reluctance to leave his desk. The reliance on me to do his running. The time he fell asleep in court. What had turned out to be the catastrophic error in deciding not to contest the issue of who had started the war. Maybe he was losing his edge, an ageing legal warrior who’d become fatally slow on the draw.

  There was a long silence between us. Then he smoothed his hair and began buttoning his shirt. ‘Well, I need to prepare for this press conference. Kennedy will want back-up. In the circumstances, it’s probably best you don’t attend. I have no wish to be vindictive, but we need to establish as much clear water between you and the team as possible.’

  I had been dismissed. Nodding – what else had I expected? – I crossed to the door connecting our two rooms and closed it behind me, then put my ear to the wood and listened as, with utter inevitability, he quietly locked it behind me. He would be going through the same intellectual and emotional procedure as he withdrew his trust, walling off areas of intimacy, roping off the avenues of thought in which, until now, I had been welcome to stroll.

  For a moment I sat perched on the corner of my bed, trying to think it all through. Not just my time in Lira, but the events that had led me there. No doubt, as the months passed, I’d formulate some glib stock response explaining, to anyone who bothered to ask, why my stint at the Legal Office of the President had been cut a trifle short. Eventually, I might half believe it myself. But what I felt at that moment was simple: traitor’s guilt – towards Jake, Winston, George, Dawit and every citizen of North Darrar.

  It took me half an hour to pack. On my way out of the Royal Delft, I knocked on Abraham’s door, but he was long gone, ferrying Winston to his excruciating encounter with the international media. I scribbled a note, put it into an envelope with a packet of Red Marlboro cigarettes, and checked out.

  35

  The doorbell rang and my mother’s voice wafted up the stairs. ‘Paula, the man from the storage company is here.’

  He was short, sturdy and very dark. I initially took him for a Spaniard but as we talked I realised he was probably a Bosnian or a Croat. His company had opted for deep purple as its brand colour, not the most becoming colour on a heterosexual male, but he looked stolidly resigned to the lurid shade of his blazer and cap. He eyed my possessions sceptically, computerised tracker in hand. ‘Only five boxes?’

  ‘Only five.’ Too little, almost, to bother with, I knew, but my mother had made it clear that every inch of storage space in her Canary Wharf flat was already accounted for.

  ‘Destination?’

  I gave him the address of my new employers in Toronto. Another year, another city. Winston had once called me ‘unrooted’, but you have to have a reason to stay in one place, a pretext for permanence.

  ‘So, one of these human-rights types, eh?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘None of my business, but why don’t you just take the stuff with you? There’s not much here.’

  Because I want to start again. ‘Oh, I don’t know how much room I’ll have at the other end,’ I lied.

  Shrugging, he stickered the boxes, then stowed them in the back of his purple minivan, where they looked silly and forlorn. Then he consulted his notes. ‘The boss wants to know if you ever used the company Sure Options, which we bought up a few years back. Because we have some boxes belonging to a Ms Shackleton, which date back ten years. She keeps paying the fees, but we can’t seem to track her down.’

  ‘Ten years?’

  He checked his clipboard. ‘1996, a Miss Shackleton, moving from Balham, London, to New York, left her stuff with Sure Options. Fifteen boxes.’

  ‘Not me. I think Shackleton’s a fairly common name, actually. Why?’

  ‘There was a small flood and some of it has water damage. We like to let customers know.’ He typed a few co-ordinates into his handheld device and waited for it to make some mysterious connection, chatting the while. ‘You know, people are crazy. Me, if I buy something, I use it. If it’s old stuff that belonged to my grandparents – photographs, furniture, painting – I want it in my house. Either that, or I sell it on eBay. Our customers, they pay us to take stuff away and they never come back for it. They don’t want it, they don’t use it, but they won’t dump it and they keep paying and paying. Great business for us, but I don’t get it.’

  That’s because it’s not ‘stuff’, I thought. It’s memories. And no one knows where to stow those. I gave a fake-cheerful laugh. ‘Well, not me, anyway.’

  ‘No, not you,’ he said, giving me a steady, disbelieving look. His device had found a signal, so I signed on the screen. He printed out a receipt, closed the back of the van, checked two fingers to his purple cap and drove off.

  My last physical encounter with anyone connected to Lira came about by chance. I was on a short stopover in London and I decided to spend the afternoon in the British Museum.

  I ordered a cappuccino in one of the cafés in the Great Court and stood for a moment, cup and saucer in my hand, craning my neck to appreciate the curve of Norman Foster’s glass-vaulted ceiling. In Rome, or Madrid, the place would have been flooded with sun, but this was London on a dull winter’s day. Muffled by the sky’s soft white blankness, the quadrangle felt like the inside of a space pod, a giant goldfish bowl. Voices were muted, distant figures blurred. I suddenly found myself focusing on a profile, just five feet away, heading towards the main doors. A shiny brown nut of a head. Goatee beard. Unmistakable.

  ‘Dr Berhane!’

  He stopped and turned, flustered. ‘Miss Shackleton. My, my. Good to see you. Yes. Indeed.’

  He darted a sideways glance towards the exit, yearning for escape. To my own surprise, I found I desperately wanted him to stay.

  ‘This is unexpected. What are you doing here?’ I had already forgotten the first rule of Lira: don’t pin people down. No names, no locators, keep it vague.

  ‘Oh, research, research,’ he said, with an airy wave of the hand. ‘Some documents the museum authorities want advice on. They opened an old box – it’s incredible how much material lies in the vaults – and found more than they anticipated.’ He turned to face me, cocking his head. ‘You might have found them interesting, in fact.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Oh, I came across some correspondence from the British consul in Darrar, a wonderful, malicious gossip. He tells London about a meeting in 1893 between Count Lorenzo Fittipaldi, the Italian explorer, and the Negus’s secretary, Heriu Tekle, to agree the border. The two men hit it off, he says, and drank so much of Fittipaldi’s Chianti they had to be carried to their quarter
s. The following day, neither of them could decipher their notes or remember what was said but didn’t like to admit as much, so they just guessed where the line was.’

  ‘Don’t tell me an entire war was fought over a drunken agreement struck by two nineteenth-century louts?’

  ‘Maybe. But, then, do we trust the British consul? That’s what your Mr Peabody would no doubt ask.’

  ‘I think I’m glad I didn’t know any of that when we were in The Hague. Are you in London long? When do you go back?’

  He gave a grim little smile. ‘Oh, yes, quite long, as it happens. I am part of our rich diaspora now, Paula. I have even been granted political asylum here. I doubt I will ever return to Lira.’

  I must have looked as surprised as I felt. Nursing my suspicions, I had taken it for granted I had fallen into a trap laid, at the very least, by a man at peace with a system.

  ‘Political asylum? You? I didn’t think …’

  ‘Yes?’ he asked, raising a quizzical eyebrow. ‘You didn’t think?’

  ‘Well, I thought you were on good terms with the Movement.’

  ‘Oh, these days, only sycophants and praise-singers are considered supportive enough,’ he said. ‘There was always destined to be a falling-out.’