The Gone-Away World (33 page)

This is the life of Benedict Anthony Carsville, as it flashes before his eyes. Most likely, as he struggles he is thinking about the toughness of his opponent's jacket, the strength of his arms. Possibly, as some men do in battle, he is worrying with terrible intensity about things like the smell of cows in the rain and the answer to last week's crossword. Be that as it may, this is what
ought
to go through his head:

He does not remember being born. No one does. Some people will tell you that they do. There are hypnotists who can help you recall it. They can also help you remember your time in the army of Rome, your life as an alien being in a far-off galaxy and what it was like to be a garden snail during the Renaissance. These recollections should be treated with the utmost caution.

He remembers his mother's orange trousers. They were made of stretchy velvet. She wore them the whole time. He remembers her hair, which was dyed, and the fact that it made him sick when he sucked it. He remembers his father, who had only one arm, and he remembers playing football with a balloon. The balloon took a very long time to do anything, so the game was a continuous exercise in frustration and delight.

He remembers the day they came and covered the playground in special rubberised tiles, so that it would be safer. They dug up the grass and the mud and replaced them with a scientifically proven composite which would reduce the chances of broken bones and scuffs. He watched the large, bored men going to and fro with rolls of underlay and stacks of special tiles. They laughed and stopped for tea, which was awful because he wanted to go on the swing. They fitted a governing device to the swing so that it couldn't go beyond a certain angle. He never really liked the playground after that, because it was just like being indoors. It smelled wrong. It was even and controlled. He waited for the new flooring to weather and split like the decking at his uncle's house, but it didn't. His father told him it was
biologically and chemically inert,
and he wanted to know what a “nert” was. His father thought this was funny.

He remembers kissing Lisa Crusky. She tasted in the main of snot, because they were only nine. There was an aftertaste of girl, which he wasn't sure was very nice. He remembers kissing her brother, Niall Crusky, and being beaten for it. He did not understand why, and actually still doesn't. Niall Crusky tasted exactly like Lisa, except without the tangerine ChapStick and the snot. After that day Lloyd Carsville insisted that his son wear grown-up clothes, in grey and blue. Benedict was the best-dressed, most uncomfortable child in school. As he got older, though, it started to look good on him, and he established that there were advantages to this. Girls—girls had soft parts boys did not, and he had discovered he was interested in those areas—became most aware of Ben Carsville's angel face and suited, conscious cool.

He was good at games. He was good at football, at hockey, at shooting and tennis and everything else. Everyone agreed he was a handsome lad, and always so well dressed. He was hot-tempered too, quick to pick a quarrel and quick to make friends. He was like a damned Greek, his uncle Frederick said, kind of admiring. Uncle Frederick worked with a lot of Greeks in the olive oil business. Most people found this funny and joked about the Mob. Uncle Frederick explained patiently that the Mafia was Italian and that in any case he actually did import olive oil. Someone had to.

He remembers his first great seduction; not his first time having sex (oh, yes, he remembers that, but it was unexpectedly drab) but his first
conquest.
It was on his nineteenth birthday. Gabrielle Vasseli was madly in love with him. Ben was madly in love with her older sister Tita, who was twenty-six. Gabrielle arrived in her sister's car, and Ben focused the full force of his charm on Tita for a few seconds as he held the door.

“Thank you, Miss Vasseli,” Ben Carsville said. “Are you sure you won't come in as well?”

Tita Vasseli looked at him and Ben Carsville saw in her eyes, in the flicker of amazement and the involuntary swallow, that she was going to say yes. Ben was the rarest of things, a genuinely beautiful man. Good-looking men are commonplace, and beautiful woman are not rare. Male beauty, capable of overcoming the stigma attached to it and undeniable, is one in many hundreds of thousands. Tita Vasseli wanted to possess this boy, to bathe in him, wash herself in him and have some of it rub off. At the very least, she wanted to bone him as he had never been boned before. She moistened her lips and sought a way to put this

to him.

Gabrielle wrapped her arm around Ben Carsville's waist.

Tita Vasseli hated her baby sister for a full ten seconds. Then she recovered herself and felt a certain relief.

Ben Carsville didn't mind. He knew what he knew. If he never saw Tita Vasseli again, he would know it for ever. The answer was yes. He seduced Gabrielle in the meantime. Tita Vasseli went home, spent a few days trying to concentrate and finally admitted to herself that she was a spluttering kettle of sexual frustration liable to boil over, melt the kitchen counter, fry the ring main and short out the neighbourhood. Weighing the consequences, she coolly decided that the only way to deal with this situation in an adult fashion was to go full steam ahead with her first plan vis-à-vis Ben Carsville,
id est
the boning. She made the call. When Gabrielle caught Tita and Ben in bed together a month later, the wailing rattled the ceiling and the gnashing of teeth was ghastly to behold. Tita was abject but also quite pleased. Later that day she showed Ben something so obscene he almost passed out.

He enlisted out of boredom, and because, in his entire life, he'd never found anyone who could say no and make it stick. (Ben Carsville's life was not like Gonzo's: Gonzo was charming, and his relentless forward momentum made him irresistible. But he knew doubt. Ben Carsville did not. He knew only that from the day they covered his playground, the earth beneath his feet was smooth, conquered, featureless.)

In the service someone knocked out one of Ben Carsville's front teeth, and he had to have it replaced. He got a fine, elegant scar under one eye from a brawl over who jogged whose elbow at the bar. He was run ragged, reached the end of his physical capacity and then discovered more within himself. He glowed. And then it all sort of smoothed out. No war, no problem. Just more slow promotion—endless, inevitable, upward progress. He watched war movies because it was the only combat around. He watched
Apocalypse Now
two hundred and fifty times. He applied for and received duty as a peacekeeper in Africa. It was fine. The bad guys shot at him—but he was in a tank and wearing protective gear. Anyway, they never hit him. Once, out of curiosity, he stopped his armoured car and got out, walked into a fire zone, and took out a machine-gun emplacement by blowing it up with a grenade. He got a medal for bravery under fire, but in truth he had been neither.

He remembers coming to Addeh Katir. He remembers the sense of hope as he landed, the plane swinging out over green canopies of forests, over mountains like shattered glass and endless interconnected lakes. He remembers the people, open, suspicious and angry, abandoned and proud. This, at last, was a place which could say no in a great voice, and mean it. He fell in love.

Addeh Katir took three days to break Ben Carsville on its wheel. It wasn't remotely interested in his good looks. By the time he arrived, the Katiris had been living with Erwin Kumar and his bandit police and his foreign backers for more than a decade, and they were sick of it. Some of them—shepherds, probably, because Ben Carsville had ordered a mini-ovicide around Red Gate—took up arms and shot at his men. They fired bullets and arrows and darts and pebbles. Ben Carsville's command lost three men to pebbles in his first week. They were hit in the throat. The fourth one got lucky: he was hit in the eye and lost binocular vision, but didn't actually expire immediately. The unit medic patched him up, but while he was waiting for transport back to the main HQ it transpired the pebble was coated in resin from a vilely poisonous tree. Private Hengist started to scream. He screamed for seven hours until finally his lungs collapsed and he died. (Shepherds are the natural enemies of wolves and hunting cats. Like wolves and hunting cats, and like sheep, they are not interested in the Geneva Conventions or the Biological Weapons Treaty. They have a job to do, and they do it. Shepherds do not need to read Clausewitz to understand about total war, because they live with it all the time.)

Ben Carsville didn't care any more that Addeh Katir was a beautiful place. Nothing in his life had prepared him for this, ever given him any cause to believe the world contained no-win situations. He didn't care that Addeh Katir's people were vibrant and noble, traders and musicians and historians, with a gentle traditional religion and a powerful sense of community. He just wanted to be who he had always thought he was. He wanted to be bigger, stronger, more debonair, more dashing. It didn't really matter whether he was good at his job as long as he looked right. He was living in the war zone now, and he got his silk dressing gown out and he marched up and down his fence to show how in control he was and how he did not give a damn. He exhorted his men to greater efforts in personal grooming, tried to get them to understand that there were no chance encounters, only actions and reactions. They followed him for a while down this strange road. If his luck had been transferable, perhaps they would have followed him to hell. But Ben Carsville's luck was an intensely selective, individual thing. His unearthly beauty was dulled by dirt and anguish, but somehow it still worked. Snipers turned aside from him. They picked those nearby instead. When Ben Carsville walked his ramparts with a cigar, bullets zinged through the air to his right or left in case he was talking to someone. He could stand where he liked and do as he pleased. The other side was not interested in his death, but in his ruin. His reality began to diverge from everyone else's in marked, dangerous ways. Then he got punched out, taken down and disgraced by Gonzo Lubitsch and his smart-mouthed arsehole friends.

He remembers the plunge into Ruth Kemner's lake. He remembers the warm, sweet water and the strange sense of coming unstuck. He remembers going to climb out, and the ghastly, stomach-churning feeling of a hand dragging him down into the mud. An enemy. A monster. He struck out, found his target. He struck again, shook the water from his eyes and saw his man. He remembers being horrified, but he honestly does not remember why. It was important but not relevant. The man was inimical. The man was trying to take his life. He didn't need to know more. This was the moment where he would be what he wanted to be. He lunged: instinct, pure and bleak and hot.

Ben Carsville is fighting for his life, giving everything he has. He tries so hard. We watch, and we wonder if we will be next. The lake churns. Blood and bubbles. A figure staggers upright. I look. I do not know whether this is what I expected or not, and I don't know whether it is good or bad.

Ben Carsville spits blood and snot, coughs and marches back up the bank. Behind him, something man-like bobs in the water. Something dead and a bit sad. Carsville looks great, all cinematic and damp, and somehow more Carsville now than he ever was before. He glances at Kemner and starts to laugh. He sits down on the shore and cackles, and they come and wrap a towel around him, and leave him there. Apparently, he has walked the plank successfully.

They take us back inside and lock us up in what was, at one stage, the secure liquor locker for the airport bar. We are still handcuffed, so all they have to do is run a thick wire-cord rope between our hands and padlock it to the pins in the wall, and we're pretty securely detained. They slam the door like matinee villains and make a point of chortling as they walk away.

Gonzo looks at me, and I look at Gonzo. We were standing at the front, closest to the action, and so it's possible that no one else saw what we saw. If they didn't see it, they won't believe that we did. I'm not sure I do either. But for a moment, that moment when Ben Carsville stood eye to eye with his opponent, before he took him down and choked his mouth with the stuff in that unlikely lake, it looked as if that opponent was
also
Ben Carsville.

C
HAINED
to a wall by an implacable enemy. Situation:
v. bad,
even
horrible.
Special forces guys are trained for horrible situations, of course, and specifically for situations involving capture and terrible torture. They are schooled in resource. They are taught to be tough and ready. Nurses don't get that kind of training, but Leah seems to be managing pretty well; Egon isn't, so he's sort of hanging by his arms and weeping, and no one can pick him up or hold him and tell him it's okay, and in any case that would be a lie. Whatever happens when you get thrown into the lake, it clearly is bad. Ben Carsville isn't in here with us. He's outside with Kemner, a fully paid-up member of her jolly monster squad. Maybe the lake is just a huge pit of nasty brainwashing, psychosis-inducing gunk. Maybe it's a consequence of the Go Away Bombs and Professor Derek's genius-dumbarse physics. Whatever it is, Kemner wants to put us in it, one by one, and will enjoy putting us in it, and she is a crazy lady with a collection of human heads on her office furniture. This is enough for us to know that we need to escape.

The trouble is that although special forces guys are prepared for this, that essentially means keeping a positive mental attitude, being ready to take your chance when it comes and knowing how to resist torture for an extra half-hour of the really bad stuff. It does not make you able to walk through walls or bend solid steel with the power of your naked brain. Nor does it necessarily give you the ability to see the obvious, because it sort of concentrates you on a win/lose mind-set where winning is frustrating the other guy and losing is giving in to pain and injury. They can get their hands in front of them easily—just step through the cuffs, because they're yogi flexible—but then what?