Even the Dogs: A Novel (15 page)

And then there was Steve, looking down at him, the glare of the sun behind his head and his knob already poking out of his trousers. Great big-bellied sod with his ruined hand hanging by his side and his eyes all screwed up with drink and confusion.

Like some kind of saviour but.

The two of them hobbling out of there, Ant’s arm around Steve’s shoulder and Steve’s arm around Ant’s waist and Ant hopping along the trodden-down path. Looking like brothers in arms or some bollocks like that. Talking all the way to the day centre. Looking like a couple of kids in a three-legged race. I did have a peg-leg but would you credit I managed to lose it, Ant said. He was on the waiting list for another one but he was going to have to go back to his home town for it and it was taking him a while to deal with a few like situations. Like someone nicking his crutches the night before, for one.

His empty trouser leg hanging and swinging like a long wet rag.

Soon found out they’d both been in the army. Ant had only done a couple of years but that was good enough for Steve. Hadn’t even been out long. Went to Afghanistan, he said, Helmand. Came back without firing a shot.

The clock on the wall pointing almost to morning now and our waiting coming to an end. Robert somewhere behind those doors. Boxes of gloves on shelves along the wall. Deep stainless-steel sinks. Voices somewhere in the building, laughter, doors opening and closing. Someone saying We’ll be bringing that big one through this morning. All of us here, standing or sitting or leaning against the wall, still waiting. It’s something we know how to do. Something we’ve had the practice at. We’ve got the time. All the time in the world.

Steve waited a few weeks before asking Ant what had happened to his leg. Waited until they’d sorted out a new place to stay, got it cleaned up and settled in. Told him about Port Stanley again, and about going to Bosnia although he left out all the stuff about what was her name, Maria, Martina, Marie. Marie. Got to the bit where the policeman shut the doors of the truck again, and gave them back their passports, and said So, now, where you want go?

Ant cooking up a big spoonful of gear while Steve told the story, and Steve watching carefully to see what he did. The spoon, the filter, the water, the citric, the handful of wrapped needles and syringes. More complicated than I thought, he said, and Ant only nodded, concentrating.

So we told him the name of the town again, Steve said, and this policeman just shook his head. Just like that. Looked off down the valley and shook his head. And he goes, No, no. You do not go there. You can not.

Ant looked at him, holding the syringe up to the light and tapping the barrel as he eased a single drop of liquid from the needle’s eye.

And then, Steve said, then this policeman goes No. You do not go. There is nothing for you there. There, even the dogs are dead. Ant shuffled across the floor, rolled up Steve’s sleeve, and looped a belt around his arm. Steve watched him. Even the bloody dogs, he said, shaking his head.

Ant looked up at him, stroking the pale skin on Steve’s inner elbow, and pressed the needle against the thin blue line of his vein, and just before he pushed it in Steve said, like to distract himself, What about you mate? What happened to your leg? Ant smiled, and slowly pushed the plunger down, and Steve didn’t say any more.

Didn’t have to wait long to find out what all the fuss was about. Like being wrapped up warmer and warmer and warmer. Like being cocooned in blankets and silk. Like more than any of these things. Like being held.

We stand, and we sit, and we lean against the wall. We wait. What else can we do. We look at the clock, and we see its hands stretch towards the morning. We hear footsteps, and the jangle of keys. The door is unlocked and opened, and the lights are turned on, and the room fills with people.

Ant knows about waiting though but. We see him now, we look and we see him now, waiting for help, bleeding into the silenced ground, lying in a field beside a road with the plants flattened beneath him as if he’d fallen from the sky. None of the pain he would have expected. Not yet. None of the screaming and panic and flailing around for something to be done. Only this whispering numbness, this stunned state in which it takes him a moment to understand where he is. To understand that some homemade bomb has thrown their Land Rover into the air, has blown another hole in the road, has probably killed one or more of his mates and done who knows what to him. Lifted him from the surface of the earth and hurled him down into this field of waist-high stalks. The flower heads looking down at him where he lies, waiting. For someone to come. For some sensation to come seeping back into his body. The tips of his fingers, the ends of his toes. The blue sky. The poppies. The nodding poppy heads. The smell of smoke, and burning, and hot, baked earth. The sounds coming back with a rush, like he was being lifted from water. Gunfire, and shouts, and heavy bootsteps across the dry soil. Faces over him, helmeted faces, and bodies dangling with equipment, and then hands upon him, searching him, cutting away his clothes, touching his face. Hands which come away from his body covered in blood. Gloved hands. Voices telling him he’s going to be okay. Voices telling him they’re going to get him out of there. Voices asking where the bloody helicopter is, where the hell those bastards are now. Someone saying they were giving him a shot of morphine to keep him going until the helicopter arrived. And everything then okay but. The fading away of the gunfire, and of everything else.

The many hands holding him tight and holding him warm and holding him safe above the good dark earth. We see the poppy heads, nodding and bowing in the breeze. We see the farmers coming to inspect their crops, walking slowly through the planted lines, treading on fallen petals, checking the curling crowns of the ripening pods. We see the farmers returning in the mid-afternoon to score shallow wounds in each pod and let the milk-white sap seep out into the warming sun, and harden and cool until the farmers come back and scrape blisters of blackened gum into tin cans dangling from their necks. As he lies there watching, waiting but. We see the gum scooped out of the tin cans and wrapped in leaves and laid out to dry in the sun, and pressed into dung-like lumps which are sold for good money to men who come rattling into the valley in old Russian saloons with loose floor panels which open up to swallow the merchandise and go clattering away again into the hills. The sound of the helicopters in the distance. The cars grinding over the mountain passes and turning off the road by an old hill-trail, the men slinging the black opium lumps into bags across their shoulders and walking a few miles to a pair of old iron shacks beneath an overhanging rock, where boys stripped to the waist are tending fires and oil-drums and squatting over fat sack-cloth bundles which ooze dark stains into the earth. We see the banked fires beneath the oil-drums burning all through the night, the boys stirring the mixture and scooping out twigs and soil and leaves. Other boys hoisting bags of fertiliser into the drums, stirring it up and straining the mixture through rice sacks and into vast cooking pots placed over other, smaller fires. More chemicals, more straining and pressing and stirring, as dawn lights up the horizon and an oily dark gunge is spread out to dry in the rising sun. Strange light falling through the fields. Golden light. Faces set against the sky and the sound of a helicopter somewhere and a voice saying Hang in there, pal, you’ll be all right. Boys’ voices chattering on in some language like Afghanistani or whatever it is, boiling up a kettle of tea and chewing on handfuls of bread, pressing the coffee-coloured powder into brick-shaped blocks the size of those pocket-dictionaries the officers use when they’re out in the villages winning hearts and minds. Or maybe the size of those fat satellite phones they use for calling down airstrikes but.

The poppy heads swaying suddenly in a strong breeze, pressing themselves flat to the ground as if ducking for cover, and the helicopter suddenly dropping out of the sky. Like a what like a fucking like a black mother goose but. What were they even doing in bloody Helmand. And all the warm hands lifting him through the air, over the field, into the belly of the mother, and the mother lifting high over the landscape, over the fields and the mountains and the roads and trails which wind almost invisibly through the valleys and passes, over the rock-sheltered pair of shacks where the bare-chested boys are bundling up dozens of paper-bound powder bricks and loading them on to dust-coloured mules who wait patiently in the midday heat before setting off in long ambling trains through the hills. And the mules keep walking steadily for days, guided by young boys who run and scramble alongside, waving sticks and shouting high-pitched commands which vanish into specks of sound no bigger than the distant birds of prey which spiral high above them, following the shape of sunlight and shadow across the valley each morning until a small group of canvas-draped shacks comes into sight around the last corner and a man ducks out through a low doorway, pulling a scarf down from his mouth and welcoming the boys, offering them tea, shaking their hands like men and already moving towards the mules to untether their loads. Behind him, inside the shacks, other men are crouched over pots and pestles and fires, pounding the pressed bricks back into dust and mixing the dust with vinegar, heating it over low fires before adding water and charcoal and washing soda, cooling and reheating and steaming the solution, passing it through filters and steambaths and pipes until finally a bright white powder begins to form in the bottom of a broad flat pan, and is carefully warmed and scraped and lifted out on to sheets of paper to dry. And by the time the powder is poured into clear plastic bags and weighed and sealed, the boys and their light-footed mules are halfway home, their pockets fat with money and their talk full of what they will do with it, the things they will buy their families and the savings they will put towards a scrap of land on which to grow poppies of their own, while somewhere overhead Ant still lies in the belly of the helicopter as it clatters over the landscape, angry and low, its shadow rising and falling as he looks up at the faces around him and feels the warm embrace of the morphine flooding through his broken body while men with headscarves and rifles and rucksacks full of heroin scramble over the hidden mountain passes which cross the border into Iran, making their way down to the roads where convoys of Toyota pickups are waiting to race across the plains towards the city, tensed for battle against the government soldiers who are waiting for them, soldiers who are now checking their weapons and sipping mint tea, listening to the evening’s briefing, watching the sun dip behind the mountains and wondering again why they would sacrifice their lives to interrupt this unstoppable flow of wealth passing through their land on its way to the marketplaces and backrooms of the city, to be packed and weighed and repacked and sold on to other traders, other smugglers, other men with weapons and suitcases and armoured cars who will take the cargo on through the fields and deserts towards the west, to the Turkish border and far beyond, while they stay here and watch the sun dip behind the mountains, and listen to the evening’s briefing, and watch through night-vision binoculars as shimmering Toyota pickups come racing towards them from out of the moss-green fearful dark.

The same darkness from which the helicopter drops down into Camp Bastion, resting lightly on the ground for a moment while the many hands carry Ant out into the warm dusty air and across the concrete, the helicopter already falling away into the sky overhead as he’s taken through to a spotless operating theatre where the scrubbed-up surgeons are waiting with forceps and scissors and an electrical saw. And as they pour more drugs in through the hole in his arm, pushing him over the edge into a deep dark painless sleep, he sees, in a single whirling moment, what we all can see: this strange journey the seeping poppy gum takes across continents, from an Afghan field to an English city street, carried by mules and men and pickup trucks, through shacks and labs and mountain passes, across borders, through hotel rooms and teashops and dark-windowed cars, stuffed into bags and suitcases and petrol tanks, coffee jars, coal sacks, butcher’s vans, freight containers, arseholes and vaginas and crudely stitched wounds, forced in and out of desperate bodies, glued in under wigs and false beards and fake-pregnant bellies, squeezing into Europe through the narrow gateway of Istanbul and on through the transit routes of Kosovo and Macedonia and Bosnia, bloody Bosnia, shipments bought and sold by men with dark glasses at café tables looking over the sea, suitcases of money changing hands in backrooms and bathrooms, arguments settled by fists and knives and boys with borrowed pistols buzzing past on scooters, the cargo gathering weight and value and bloody narrative as it hurtles on through Italy and Germany and Holland and Belgium and France. And as Ant rumbles his way home in the hold of a Hercules, his leg cut down to a bandaged stump, he flies over an English Channel across which the heroin shipments are pouring, in fishing boats and yachts and speeding cruisers, in light aircraft, in the distended stomachs of human mules pacing uncomfortably up and down the decks of passenger ferries, in the backs of container lorries bringing the stuff in by the tonne to be driven on to warehouses and safehouses across the country, weighed and cut and bagged again on kitchen tables and workshop benches, sold on and split and sold on again, broken down into smaller and smaller batches until a bald-headed man in a baggy tracksuit gets out of a BMW on the Milton Estate, jogs up the concrete stairs of a towerblock to the ninth floor, knocks twice on the steel door, and walks in past a young man in a baseball cap who nods and closes the door behind him. And a few minutes later a boy in a grey hooded top comes out of the same stairwell carrying a bike, and rides off down the hill towards the railway sidings, down past the police station and the hospital, over the canal and under the motorway and around the roundabout to the Miller’s Arms and the phoneboxes where Danny still waits, tutting at the damp ragged note Danny hands him and circling around on his bike before flicking a bag into the long grass and pedalling away up the hill, looking once over his shoulder to see Danny scrabbling across the ground for the gear and shutting himself in the phonebox with Einstein still jumping around outside, laying out his works on the crooked metal shelf and trying to keep his sweating shaking hands even a little bit still while he cooks up a fix in a blackened spoon, too much, holding his breath as he jabs the needle into the filter and draws up the coffee-coloured juice, too much, he knows it’s too much or he thinks it might be but so what he wants to make sure, so what he doesn’t care, pulling down his soiled trousers without waiting for it to cool and poking a new hole through the scabbing wound over his fem pushing in deeper in and feeling for the vein feeling for the blood feeling the pain the good pain that means he’ll be well soon that all shall be well and he draws back the syringe a little to see the blood from the vein to be sure he’s got the right place but there’s nothing there there’s nothing there he moves the needle he takes it out and puts it in and takes it out and puts it in and there’s nothing there so he pulls it right out and wipes it clean on his sleeve and turns to the window and uses the dark night as a mirror to focus in on his neck he clenches his jaw to make the veins stand out he chooses a vein and watches closely in the darkly lit glass and pushes the needle in to a good new vein a clean vein the blood billowing back into the syringe and he eases the plunger down down down and feels the gear charging through his body’s borders around his bloodstream through his heart and his lungs and his brain and it feels good good good he feels well again he feels whole again he feels sorted at last he feels what he feels warm and clean and wrapped up in silk and tissue and cotton wool he feels the way he felt when he first began he leans his face against the cold dark glass and looks out at the city at the lights at the passing cars the passing trains the orange-bellied clouds and the black star-pierced sky a flock of pigeons silhouetted against the neon walls of the shopping centre in the valley and he drops the needle to the floor and presses his hands to the cold glass and slides to the floor and curls up on the floor all this shall pass and he waits for all this to pass.