Authors: Catherine Sampson
“I’ve seen an allegation that Melanie led a patrol into danger just to get the pictures. Is that possible?”
“It sounds unlikely.” Sal’s eyelids were still heavy, and he looked as though he were sleep-talking, but I knew his brain
was wide awake. “But Robin, you know the line between truth and finessed truth doesn’t actually exist.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“All right.” Sal hunched his shoulders and appeared to warm to the subject. “Just for argument’s sake, you understand. If
you see a correspondent reporting from Moscow, with a window onto Red Square behind him, is he in Moscow?”
“Yes.”
“Correct. Is there a window onto Red Square behind him?”
“Probably not. There’s most likely a screen, with prerecorded film of Red Square that loops round and round. Watch long enough
and the same clouds scud across the same bit of sky.”
“Is that faking it?” Sal is great on rhetorical questions, and he answered himself. “Not at all, it’s just misleading.”
“It’s faking it,” I disagreed.
“Call it what you will. Faking it, being creative, that’s my point.” Sal made an expansive gesture. “How about this? You’re
making a documentary about Arizona. You need some filler shots, you’ve got so much bloody sand that it’s pouring out your
ears. You have some great film you shot in New Mexico with wheeling birds in the sky. Vultures, eagles, parrots, I don’t know
one bloody bird from the next. You edit them in. Hey presto, New Mexican parrots in the sky above Arizonan deserts. Faked,
misleading? Does it matter unless you’re a bird?”
“Or an ornithologist,” I said. “Here’s one. An anchor in the studio in London. He’s just read a news report about a shootout
in Atlanta. The correspondent in the U.S.A. is on the screen. He describes the shooting in dramatic detail as though he were
there, or had at least interviewed a witness. . . .”
“But actually he just watched it on CNN, I know, I know, it happens. But all of these are trivial. Trivial . . .” Sal savored
the word. “Okay. You’re on top of a hill in Afghanistan in a lull in the fighting, Northern Alliance fighters with a few dug-in
tanks on your hilltop, Taliban opposite, everyone just sitting and waiting. So peaceful you could hear a pin drop. Down below
is a village, women and children going about their business. On top of the hill, the men with the guns see you arrive with
a bloody big camera, and they say hey-ho, here we go, helpful as anything. Shall we take a potshot to make your trip worthwhile?
Set up your camera over there, maybe you’d like to stand in that trench we’ve helpfully dug.”
Sal broke off. Reached for his coffee and pulled a disapproving face as the cold liquid hit his throat.
“And?”
He shook his head, shrugged. “Well, they’d probably have fired the guns sometime. If not that day, maybe the next. If not
then, maybe in a week’s time. You might as well get it on film while you’re there.”
When Lorna called and reminded me it was time for our weekly lunch, I tried to back out of it. In the end I couldn’t say no.
By the evenings my big sister is exhausted. She’s returned to work on a part-time basis and her office is around the corner
from mine, so we grab what we can when we can.
She suggested we meet in a café called Dolce Vita, and I agreed. There’s never any point in disagreeing with Lorna. When I
got there she waved me over to the window where she’d secured a table and greeted me as she often did, with an imperative
rather than a hello.
“Sit,” she ordered, “and relax.”
It was hot outside and like a greenhouse by the window, but Lorna always feels cold, so I put up with it. I found myself almost
blinded by the sunlight, so I dug my sunglasses out of my bag.
“Did I miss something? You’ve won an Oscar?” Lorna inquired. I glared at her. “Seriously, how’s your face?”
She reached out across the table, and I allowed her to remove my sunglasses and lift my hair back from my scar.
“I can hardly see it,” she said. “I don’t know what all the fuss was about. Okay, let’s order, or we’ll never get our food.”
She beckoned a waiter and ordered, on my behalf as well as hers, two grilled vegetable salads. “That is what you want, isn’t
it?” she checked as he turned to go.
“That’s fine.”
She’s my sister, so my expression immediately alerted her to the fact that my mind was not on grilled vegetables, and when
I said nothing, she persisted.
“It’s nothing,” I told her, and refused to budge. Lorna sticks her nose into everyone’s business. You have to give her the
verbal equivalent of a light smack to keep her out of it.
Lorna was annoyed, but there was also something eating her up, something making her excited and jumpy.
“Joe is coming over,” she told me.
I had introduced Lorna to Father Joe Riberra nearly two years ago, and it was difficult to forget the bolt of electricity
that seemed to pass between them as they shook hands that first time. I knew they’d been in e-mail contact since, but I didn’t
know whether sexual energy of that sort could flourish in the ether. Had she converted him to lust, or had he converted her
to the Lord?
It soon emerged that Lorna had seen a program a couple of days before about the celibacy of the priesthood, and it was now
obsessing her. Did I realize that celibacy was not a dogma of the church, but a regulation, that the pope could change it
at will? she asked. Did I realize that many priests had left the official Catholic Church in order to marry but continued
in a breakaway church? Did I realize that in the early church, priests had married and had defied calls to abstain from sex,
that they had had children, and that some popes were even the sons of popes, and that it was not until the year 1139 that
Pope Innocent II finally decreed that priests must not marry?
“It sounds as though you made notes.”
“I just remember because it’s so interesting,” she retorted. “Don’t you think it’s interesting? We’ve all grown up thinking
Catholic priests have to be celibate, but they don’t, not really.”
“Lorna,” I said gently, “you’d have to convince him, not me, and I would think he knows most of this already.”
She stared at me. “I have to have him,” she said, tears rising to her huge eyes.
I gazed at her, and my heart went out to her. When we were young, she was the dominating force, the stunning beauty, the razor-sharp
mind. For the past few years, she had been physically incapable of taking control of her life. Now, as she recovered her energy,
she seemed to want to grab hold of everything and bend it to her will, as though all of this—a hunger for love, the need for
sex—had roared back to her in full throttle.
There were many times, when we were young, when Lorna had comforted me. But it has always been impossible to comfort her.
When I started to speak, she waved me off the subject. I waited, as always, on her whim. When she spoke again, it was in a
conversational tone.
“Gilbert,” she said, and as soon as she uttered his name I knew this topic might be easier for her, but not for me, “he ran
into trouble in France.”
“What kind of trouble?” My voice sounded heavy.
“I dread to think. Business trouble, I suppose. He’s not very forthcoming, but he needed a place to stay, so I’ve let him
stay at Ma’s. Well, Ma’s not there.” She was immediately on the defensive, and with good reason. “The place is empty; it might
as well be used or it’s just going to waste.”
My jaw had dropped. I was appalled.
“She’ll kill you,” I said. Which was not, in my view, an exaggeration. What Ma would do when she returned to find her former
husband and Antichrist installed in her home was too horrible to contemplate.
Lorna had that obstinate look in her eye that we all missed so much while she was ill and that now irritated me beyond reason.
“She’ll never know. He’ll be gone long before she gets back. He understands it’s just temporary, but he’s so grateful. He’s
got nowhere else to go.”
“And why is it he has no friends?” I challenged her. “Could it be that he is untrustworthy and dishonest, and takes advantage?”
“He has me.” Lorna was gruffly defensive.
“You’re mad,” I told her, and I was really angry. Angry that she was unable to let well enough alone, angry that she was willfully
antagonizing our mother, angry that she was getting me involved.
For an hour I tried to talk Lorna out of installing Gilbert in Ma’s house, but either she didn’t see it or she relished the
prospect of baiting Ma. I suspected the latter, and by the time I left the restaurant we were scarcely speaking.
When I got back to my desk, I found an e-mail waiting from my mother.
It’s all very pretty, obviously. But what is the Point? What am I supposed to be Doing with myself? I’m Bored. I think I will
be back later this week. I’m going to ring up and find out about planes. I haven’t unpacked, I don’t think I belong here.
Nancy seemed quite Normal in London, but I can’t get the hang of her here.
It was as well she had not overheard my conversation with Lorna, or she would indeed be on the next plane. I replied.
You’re scarcely off the plane, Ma, give it a chance. For heaven’s sake RELAX.
And then I remembered that was exactly what Lorna had told me to do before she sent my blood pressure rocketing.
That afternoon, several things fell into place. Henry from the photo archive finally rang me and gave me the name of the photographer
who had taken the picture of Mike and Melanie: Edwin Rochester. I had never heard the name, but I called around and learned
that he was a young freelancer. I rang around some more—by now I was calling way beyond the circle of my immediate acquaintances—and
within another hour I had a mobile phone number for him. When I finally got through to him, it felt a little like tracking
down Father Christmas. Except that he had a New Zealand accent. He was at Heathrow, he told me, about to fly off to Chechnya.
How could he help me? I could hear him scratching his head at first when I described the photograph. But then he got it. Afghanistan,
he told me; the photograph had been taken on the road from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif in late October three years earlier, just
before the launch of the air war. I got to my feet and fired questions at him while I paced the room. This new piece of information
was a revelation. Afghanistan, between Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif, north of the Salang Pass, on a road of stark, arid beauty
with minefields to right and left and the bright fertility of an irrigated valley in the distance. That was where Mike Darling
and Melanie had met for the first time. And immediately my brain made the connection with Sean Howie, who had died in an ambush
in Kabul. Melanie had been there, too, weeks later.
“What happened?” I asked over the sound of the airport announcements at his end.
“Melanie and I were driving north to join the Northern Alliance. It was a pretty hellish journey. We spotted this patrol stuck
a couple of hundred meters away in a little valley. They’d been following a jeep track off the main road—God knows where they
were heading—and we saw them from the road and drove down out of curiosity. We might even have offered to give them a tug.
But as soon as we got there, we came under fire from the ridge. A couple of them were out of the vehicle trying to move some
rocks, and we’d just got out our jeep to go and talk to them, so when they started firing we were all the way out in the open,
and we hit the ground. That’s when I took the photo.”
“What happened then?”
“Well, there was some shooting back and forth, and after a while they scarpered and we got out of there. Melanie stayed with
the patrol.”
“They asked her along?”
Edwin gave a bark of laughter. “You must be kidding. Those guys can’t stand journalists. Melanie was muttering to me that
she wanted to stick around. She’d been trying to find a way to spend time with special forces, but I wasn’t interested, I
had to get on to Mazar-e-Sharif. So Melanie told me to drive on and leave her there, and that she’d catch up with me later.
So that’s pretty much what I did. The next time those guys turned around, they’d have just found her there with her backpack
and her camera.”
“You just left her there? In the middle of Afghanistan?”
“Hey”—he sounded defensive—“you can’t argue with Melanie when she’s got an idea in her head.”
I shook my head in disbelief. But the fact was that she had survived. Besides, something else was nagging at me.
“So how did the photo get to have Darling’s name on it if the SAS are so publicity shy?”
“I showed the photos to Melanie later, when we were both back in London. She must have told me his name, and I must have written
it on the print and forgotten about it. I was in a hurry when I gave those prints to the publicity department, didn’t really
look at what was in the envelope, just dropped it off and ran. I guess someone in the publicity department didn’t realize
Darling’s name shouldn’t have been used. Actually, his face shouldn’t have been used, either, but there you go. You say you
found the picture on a publicity board? It must have been up there for years.”
“Nothing went on between Mike and Melanie did it?” I had to ask, although it felt ridiculous. From what Edwin had just told
me, the photograph was taken when they met under fire. No tenderness then, just a rude introduction.
“Between the guy in the picture and Melanie?” Edwin repeated the question incredulously, as though it sounded as ridiculous
to him as it did to me. “If so, she didn’t tell me about it.”
I could hear from his breathing that he was walking through the terminal.
“Hey, that’s my flight they’re calling. Darling and Melanie?” he repeated again, wonderingly, as though he might need a few
hours to think it over. “Nah,” he said eventually. “They’d just met, what could have gone on out there? Although anything
could have happened after I left. She stayed on with them. Can’t help you with that.” In the background I could hear a woman’s
voice asking for his boarding pass. “Sorry, gotta go.”
I said good-bye, but the phone had already gone dead.