‘I was glad to see you. I asked after you all over Kabul and Mazari-Sharif. Nobody knew where you were. Until I met an MSF woman at the Intercontinental who said she’d seen you in Bamiyan, I was beginning to think you were dead or gone home. You vanished after we killed those guys in the truck.’
‘We didn’t kill them. That’s your vanity again.’ The expression in Astrid’s eyes was so intense, and made Kellas feel so much a part of the world, that for a moment he experienced an ecstatic sense of discovery, as if he had found that a thing he had always known of and always wanted had, in fact, belonged to him all along, and all he had lacked was the words with which to claim it. ‘We didn’t kill them,’ said Astrid again. ‘We had a hand in it, that’s all, a small part. Did you write about it for your paper?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I was ashamed. I didn’t want people to think badly of me. Besides, how could I make it true? If I’d told the whole story, it would have had no place in a newspaper. I would have had to write about why I behaved the way I did. I would’ve had to write that I was influenced by love.’
‘Don’t say that!’
‘Why not?’
‘I knew you were taking it too seriously. I knew you were going to try and use it as a blood bond between us.’
‘How could I not take it seriously when two men burn to death in front of me?’
‘I know what happened. I know I did wrong. I’m carrying it with me. But it’s my burden, Adam, not
ours
. What you care about most isn’t those two guys dying. What you care about is that it happened while the two of us were there after we’d spent the night
together and you figure the worse that happened, the closer it made us.’
‘No. It wasn’t like that.’
‘I know you lied to me when you said you wanted to fuck me. I know you wanted something more from me. You wanted the lovething. Everybody wants that. Everybody thinks everybody has it, so everybody wants to have it. Reckon they’re entitled. Everybody wants love so badly that whatever they get, love is what they call it. It’s the new religion. Love is God.’
‘You’re not right about the truck,’ said Kellas doggedly. ‘It mattered to me.’
‘What did you do about it?’
‘I went looking for the families of the drivers.’ He had to repeat it for Astrid, who didn’t understand at first. When he said it a second time she leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. She went to open another bottle of wine. Kellas got up and went to the bedroom with his glass. He propped up the pillows at the head of the bed and sat down with his back against them. After a moment Astrid came through with the second bottle and sat down beside him. Kellas put his arm around her and she leaned her head against him while he told her about the weeks he had spent without her in Afghanistan, after Bagram. He could see the two of them reflected in the drab green square of the switched-off TV on the chest of drawers at the end of the bed. Once, while he was talking, he saw Astrid look up at him, when she didn’t realise he could see.
After a time Astrid slipped out of Kellas’s arm and sat up. They had opened the third bottle of wine.
‘Take off your jeans,’ said Kellas.
Astrid rolled off the bed, unbuckled her belt and pulled off her jeans. Kellas took off his jeans and socks. Astrid laughed when she saw he wasn’t wearing any underpants. Like in a porn film, she said, as she sat down beside him.
‘I did lie to you,’ said Kellas. ‘I was in love with you then. I’m in love with you now. That’s why I came.’
‘When I met you in Afghanistan, you talked as if you didn’t believe one person could ever know another,’ said Astrid. ‘When we were heading up to the Italian hospital, you sounded like a man denying the possibility of love. You can see why I’m surprised at you turning up out of nowhere now, saying you love me. Back then you sounded like a man who’d been hurt and disappointed, and learned something. Now you sound like a teenager. The man seemed like someone I could trust. I’m not sure about this new guy.’
‘I was wrong,’ said Kellas. ‘I’d forgotten there were other ways to know someone apart from watching, touching and listening.’
‘Sure. You can just invent them. Is that what you’re doing now? Inventing me?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Making a nice story out of me?’
‘No!’
‘There’s a third person here, Adam,’ Astrid said. ‘There’s some weird amalgam of what you imagine I am and what you imagine you are lying in the bed between us, and you’re too interested in that creature. We can’t be that. Besides, I told you. I like to be with you, in most ways, except that way. That love-way, whatever it is.’ Astrid drew up her knees and folded her arms across her chest. She pressed herself more closely against Kellas. ‘My mother was obsessed with the idea that she couldn’t be close enough to me, or that I should be closer to her. She wanted to be alone but she wanted to be alone with some other identity, a twin, a shadow, a reflection. A satellite. That was her idea. She told me once that her soul was too big to fit inside one person. She said she had a fat soul.’
Kellas laughed.
‘Yeah, it was funny. She was funny. But she was scary, too. The thing she wanted to make us closer – sometimes it was love and sometimes it was death. A couple of times she tried to kill herself while I was there. Once she chugged down a bunch of pills when I was in the bath and she was standing by the washstand. Another
time she cut her wrists in the kitchen. We were talking across the table while she was chopping carrots and she just looked at me and ran the knife over her wrist. It was heavy and sharp and the weight of it cut into her without her needing to press much. I was twelve then. I often wondered about the phrase that suicide was a cry for help. When I was a kid I used to think it meant it was a summons to children to go help their mothers kill themselves. She always wanted to involve me in her activities. A mother-daughter thing. She got confused, I think. Death or love, it was the same. They both seemed like refuges and it seemed natural to her to have me with her in them.’
‘Involve you in her activities? Like death.’
‘I know it sounds crazy. I didn’t want to go with her!’
‘No.’
‘I can move towards something, but I don’t want to get there. I don’t want to get stuck. It feels too much like dying.’
‘It’s OK, Astrid.’
‘But that’s where I grew up, you know? A family with one member who was always just about to leave, just about to go to a place she shouldn’t go, and where I shouldn’t follow her. It was like living in a house with an extra door. There’s the front door, and the door onto the yard, and the door to the attic, and there’s the door that leads to dying. And none of the doors are ever locked.’ She looked at Kellas. ‘I never wanted to die, Adam. And my Dad didn’t, either, he just went quietly in his sleep; and my brother, he doesn’t want to die. But if you grow up in a house like that, with an extra door to dying – it’s your home. That’s what seems familiar.’
They lay there in silence, listening to each other’s breathing.
Kellas kissed her and whispered: ‘Would you believe me if I said that touching you there ever so gently, as gently as that, while I look into your eyes, made me happier than anything?’
‘Maybe. Do it some more and I’ll be sure.’
A small part of Kellas wondered if it would be better not to have sex with Astrid now, when they were both tipsy, in the aftersound
of her memories. That, if he refrained, it might prove something. But he wanted to, and so did she, and they did. Pleasures were not excused from evolution. No human pleasure would have survived that didn’t promise comfort far beyond its own consummation.
B
ehind the hangover when Kellas woke up there was a fear that for a few moments he kept at a distance, unnamed. When he opened his eyes he saw the fan hanging from the ceiling. It floated there, somewhat darker than the dark, like a giant asterisk. Kellas picked up a glass of water standing on the shelf by the bed. He drained it and felt better but his heart was still kicking against his ribs, like a man having a fit in a cell too small for him to lie down in. Astrid was not beside him. She was not in the room. He should get up and look for her, but he didn’t want to. He was afraid. He heard sounds from the other side of the bedroom door. Wood scraping against wood, and a creaking. He should go and see what it was, but he didn’t want to. Reluctantly he switched on the bedside light. He counted the empty bottles in the room. There were three, and another empty next door. Kellas was sure he hadn’t drunk more than one and a half. Astrid’s boots were still on the floor. She was close.
He was as prey as anyone to the fears that crowd in on men and women in the small hours of the morning, yet there was a sharpedged, granite weight to the thought that was forming in his head now. The mind drew patterns from isolated circumstances, coincidences and suspicions. This pattern was heavy. It was real. He could blink and take deep breaths and make the bedside lamp come on but the fear persisted.
Astrid was an alcoholic.
Hard as he rejected it, hard as he tried to persuade himself that the darkness was to blame, the pattern insisted on its reality. That
Astrid was an alcoholic who was trying hard, for herself and because she was a mother, not to be an alcoholic any more. Who lived on an island and had, as Bastian tried to tell him, submitted herself to the rule of a warden because of her weaknesses. That was his word. An island, come to think of it, with a limited number of bars and liquor outlets, from where it would be easy to get yourself barred, across the board, voluntarily or otherwise. Assholes. An island, for that matter, with no public transport, but where Astrid didn’t have a car and didn’t drive. Why would she do that unless her licence had been taken away?
The recovering alcoholic’s fear of the binge. Had there been binges? What a fine idea it must have seemed when Astrid missed her period after 9/11 and found she was pregnant. To cover the great story of her generation for her magazine, and at the same time to protect her unborn child from her mother’s temptations, in a Muslim country, where alcohol was forbidden. A place in which, as Astrid had told him, her affliction did not flourish. She flew into Dushanbe and checked into the Hotel Tajikistan. She’d binged there. That was her state when he’d met her in Faizabad, throwing up into the gorge: hung over. Of course there was booze in Afghanistan, a hardcore drunk with dollars could easily find what they needed, but Astrid was fighting it, and the child inside her was an ally of her will. She’d left Kellas twice. What did that have to do with alcohol? Nothing, nothing at all. Except that the first time, after crossing the Anjoman pass, had been when she realised he was carrying a litre of whisky, and the second, in the helicopter, when he had said to her ‘Next stop, the bar, Hotel Tajikistan.’ And she had stayed in Afghanistan.
Kellas got up, put on his clothes and switched on the main light. Standing in the ordinary brightness the pattern seemed less heavy and inevitable. Ridiculous man! Astrid liked a drink. One of the reasons the alcoholic theory was absurd was that it would make him, Kellas, the enemy, a serpent. Not winning her from Bastian for himself. Stealing her from Bastian and Naomi and delivering her to the sauce. Even more topsy-turvily, the cold, hostile Astrid who had
greeted him when he arrived would be the good Astrid, and the laughing, affectionate Astrid of the past few hours would be the weak, beaten, greedy one. No, that would not be reasonable. It would be the same as imagining that in all Astrid’s yearning, the hunting of the deer and sexual ecstasy, the pursuit of knowledge in humankind’s wild places and of the mystery in the darkness, the kernel of her desires, was a glass of diluted ethanol.
He went into the sitting room. The curtain was drawn across the glass on the terrace side. All the lights were on and the room was chilly. The fourth empty bottle was where they had left it. The fifth bottle wasn’t there. The snacks he had bought sat unopened in their bright packaging on the table. It was midnight. He’d slept for many hours. He opened the door of the bathroom, afraid and hoping. Astrid wasn’t there. He heard the curtain flapping and came out of the bathroom. It was the wind; the sliding door must be wide open. Kellas went over and jerked the curtain aside.
Astrid was sitting on the balustrade with her back to the marsh, her bare feet just grazing the terrace as she swayed lightly. Her head was hanging forward. He couldn’t see her face, only the top of her head. Her left arm hung down limp, as if dislocated. Her right hand clutched a plastic tumbler which she had put down on the parapet of the balustrade but which had toppled onto its side. Judging by the small dark spot that had sunk into the wood at the lip of the tumbler, it had been almost empty. The fifth bottle, which was empty, stood between the chairs.
Kellas stood in the doorway, watching her. If he spoke, she might wake up suddenly and fall. He could hear the rough sound of her breathing. She listed, inhaled sharply, belched and muttered something. Kellas took two steps forward and put his hands firmly on her shoulders. Astrid’s head shot up and he was looking into her face and seeing that his fear was true.
She was both alive and dead. There was a crusty tidemark of black wine remnants running across her lips and her nose and eyes were red. There was a bruise on her left cheekbone. She was awake
yet operating in the secondary consciousness of someone who’d become habituated to huge infusions of alcohol. Kellas had seen them, the forms of men and women who came up to him in pubs at eight in the evening, when they had been drinking since morning. At first they seemed sober, merely grey and red and thoughtful in their speech, until he realised they were repeating the same sentences over and over, and all that was left of them was motor function and senses enough to communicate their simple needs to bar staff and cab drivers. Really they were three-quarters dead and Kellas had always been chilled by the gradual awareness that he was talking to the container of a familiar human being when the human was not present. The cold, lizardish emptiness of the eyes was not easy to forget even once the human returned and now he was looking into Astrid’s eyes and they were like that. He had told the woman through these eyes that he loved her and the eyes were watching him now but the woman was not there.
Astrid tossed her head hard to the left and Kellas tried to pull her off the balustrade but she struggled and called him a fucking asshole.
‘Come on, honey,’ said Kellas. ‘A little time vomiting under observation, and a lot of water.’ He would find it hard not to remember the reptile stare and the slackness of her jaw.
‘Get me off this fucking island, asshole. Where’s Naomi? I love my girl. Get off me!’ Astrid kicked Kellas hard in the stomach and he fell back winded. His head reminded him how much he had drunk.
‘Hey, I never showed you the pictures of Naomi,’ said Astrid, with sinister clarity. Kellas was taking deep breaths. Astrid dug in her jeans with her left hand and with her right hand lifted up the tumbler. She looked into it and raised it to her mouth, tipping it vertically and hanging her head back, her other hand still squirming inside her pocket. Kellas saw that she was about to lose her balance, lunged forward to stop her and almost toppled over the balustrade after she did. Astrid fell without a word or a cry and the impact of
her body in the marshwater spattered Kellas’s face with cold wet filth. The sound triggered an alarm of goose-honks and panicked feathers beating air.
Kellas ran to the stairs and down to the jetty. The din of geese smothered any sound Astrid might be making. Shouting her name, Kellas crouched down at the edge of the jetty, swivelled round, placed his hands flat on the decking, and with a vault as soft as he could make it jumped into the reeds.
His feet were clasped in cold black pap and he sank till the water came to just over his knees. There was no firmness underfoot, only the tightening of the yield of the lower mud to the point where he could lift the foot without the other penetrating much deeper. He realised that he should have taken off his boots. He kept shouting for Astrid as he stepped forward. He could not hear her over the noise of the geese and the splash and suck of his own progress. The lights of the hotel were screened from the marsh by the projecting terraces; they destroyed Kellas’s night vision without illuminating the reeds where Astrid had fallen.
The cacophony of the geese began to diminish and in front of him Kellas heard an evil sound, as if somebody was vomiting underwater. He tried to break from wading to a canter and fell forward into the water and, a foot beneath it, the black mire. For an instant the mud’s dead, passionless softness held his face in its gummy bite. He struggled to his knees and stood again and in two more steps reached Astrid. She was prone, keeping her head out of the water with her arms held stiff, like a woman doing press-ups. Her shoulders shook with the effort and her face was dark and dripping, as if she had only just managed to raise herself up out of the mud. She coughed, whimpered, her back flexed in a spasm and as she retched her elbows gave way and she went down. Kellas squatted, braced, clamped his arms around Astrid’s chest under her armpits and heaved her up. He hadn’t the strength or leverage to get her on her feet so he pulled back and kneeled down at the same time till the two of them were together, on their knees in the mud, the water up to their waists.
‘Get your hands off me,’ said Astrid.
‘No,’ said Kellas, hugging her more tightly. He felt her body stiffen and gag and she retched. A fluid stream of vomit splashed into the water.
‘Get off! Get OFF!’ shouted Astrid, her voice rising to a scream, almost a bark. She twisted in Kellas’s embrace, struck him with her elbows and threw her head back, cracking him hard on the bridge of his nose. She broke free and managed to stand and began to wade in the direction of the creek. Kellas pulled off his boots and went after her. His nose warmed and filled and he felt blood oozing over his upper lip. He wiped it off with his sodden sleeve and began to shiver. The cold was testing him now. Astrid fell and got up but she had a start on him. He yelled at her to come back and she answered with a shriek in which there could have been a word, not one he recognised.
When he reached her, they fought. She struck him with her knees and elbows and the flat of her hand and he wanted to hit her back but couldn’t get a good swing at her. He tried to grasp her, tie off her flying arms with his and start to drag her back to the jetty. While they fought, and Kellas rose to Astrid’s level of fury, hoping it’d help him overmatch her, in the darkness, in the smell of blood and mud and vomit, and while his hysteria spiralled till the crashing of the water and the blaring goose-brass was overcome by a man and woman’s screams of fucking sons of cunting whoring bitches, Kellas could see the lights of the cars passing on the road less than two hundred yards away, following their tunnels of light, which did not reach to the two fools fighting over nothing in a dark, freezing marsh.
Astrid tired first and went limp. She began to weep. Kellas held her still for a little while, then led her slowly, sobbing and shivering, to the jetty, which was close. She pulled herself up onto the decking, with his help, and sat with her legs dangling over the side. By the time Kellas was out of the water and standing over her, she had her head thrown back and was howling Mom, and that she was sorry.
‘Your mom’s gone,’ said Kellas. ‘You’re mom now. Get up, you can’t stay here.’ But Astrid stopped crying and lay down on the jetty with her eyes closed and would not move.
It had only been a few weeks since the pre-Iraq hostile environment course and Kellas hadn’t had time to forget the proper way to carry an injured comrade to safety. Of all the skills they had been taught, this had seemed the least useful. He would drag a photographer a few yards behind a wall by their collar, if it came to it. Now he was squatting and hoisting Astrid over his back and carrying her along the jetty rather than have her choke and die alone in the cold while he went for help.
He carried her through the lobby, kicking the doors open as he went, down the steps and across the parking lot, the gravel biting his bare feet. A light was on in the hotel manager’s house. An old wooden toboggan hung with white ice skates was planted upright in front of the house by way of Christmas decoration. Kellas let Astrid slip off his back as far as to let the ground take some of the weight and banged on the manager’s door. Astrid moaned and coughed and Kellas ran his hand over his face to clear what crusted blood and mud he could. The door opened and the manager stood in front of them unblinkingly, wearing a synthetic fleece over a pair of pyjamas.
‘Astrid Walsh,’ she said. ‘Godammit, honey! What is it about my hotel? I thought you were a good girl now. Oh, God!’ She was taking off her slippers and putting on boots. ‘How much you let her drink?’
‘I reckon she had three and a half bottles.’
‘Of what?’
‘Wine!’
‘Wine ain’t so bad. But you, sir, have got no reason to be proud of yourself…Damn right! Jesus Christ, you been in the creek? There’s easier ways of catching duck than chasing them with your bare hands in the phrags after midnight. And bare feet, dear Lord. Hold on there. Don’t think you’re coming in.’ She began going and
coming back. She brought them each a blanket, and galoshes, then a large tumbler of something and a bucket.
‘Make her drink this, and throw up in the bucket,’ she said. ‘I’m getting the car ready.’ She backed her car up closer to the house and began spreading newspapers over the seats.
‘You’re very kind,’ said Kellas. ‘I’m sorry for this.’
‘Any damage to the room comes off your card,’ said the manager. ‘For the rest, you can answer to Bastian. Oh, Astrid Walsh, I saw you with your daughter in Parks Market on Saturday and I thought, those two’re going to be OK.’