We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (30 page)

T
he silver Tahoe carrying Rafael, Zac and Yehia stopped up ahead. Three of the doors opened at once and the men got out and walked slowly back towards Kellas and Astrid’s Mitsubishi. Rafael’s eyes were narrowed against the light and his head was bent forward. He wanted to confer about where they should go next and he had many other things on his mind. He spent hours during the day and night on his Thuraya, conferring with his colleagues around the theatre and in America. He didn’t sleep much.

Their two cars had stopped just short of a viaduct, which led over a wadi and, so far as they could tell, on towards Basra. The road was a straight, well-made line of tarmacadam, black against the granular weed-sown churn of the desert. There were no other vehicles on the road. There were no people or buildings and there was no wind or sound. Kellas switched off the engine and he and Astrid got out. The five of them stood close together, facing inwards, each of them turning again and again to search the horizon for any movement or smoke, except for Yehia, who searched the faces of the other four. Kellas felt the heat of the sun on his back. He’d taken off his flak. He was the only one still wearing his helmet. To the south, from where they had come, he saw two Marine gunships, far enough away that their rotors couldn’t be heard and only just recognisable by their ashy outlines, scorched flakes blown out of a distant fire. After a few seconds they moved out of sight.

Yehia and Zac smoked. Rafael was afraid that Basra would fall and he would miss it. Kellas wanted to be there, too, to see the British tanks trundle squeaking down the main street, the
commanders grinning under their black berets, teeth bright in sunburned faces, with the crowds ten deep and cheering, flowers bouncing off the tank armour, the girls in their spring dresses scrambling up onto the turrets to kiss the soldiers and the man in the white suit proclaiming liberty. It was easy to imagine because it was not really imagining, but remembering; and not even remembering something he had seen, but remembering newsreel clips of British tanks liberating Europe in 1944, except for the man in the white suit, who was from
Casablanca.
The girls didn’t wear spring dresses here, or kiss strangers; and where would they get flowers?

Astrid had a map. She pointed to where she thought they were. Basra was only twenty miles away.

Rafael shifted his weight from foot to foot, spun the Thuraya in his hand, with its aerial up, like a baton, and invoked shit. ‘I don’t know. I can see this on the front page of the
Post
tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I need the fucking dateline.’

‘This is a beautiful road,’ said Kellas. ‘It leads straight to Basra. There are fifty thousand British and American troops back there who want to take Basra. And yet we’re the only people on this road.’

‘It sounds to me like it’s over,’ said Zac. ‘If you believe the BBC, the American armour’s halfway to Baghdad already.’

‘They only crossed the start line the night before last,’ said Kellas.

‘Let’s get closer to Basra,’ said Astrid. ‘We’ll take it carefully. Do it like this, move, stop, surveill, move.’

‘Carrying two hundred litres of fuel in a sports-utility vehicle in these parts can never be careful,’ said Kellas. They stopped talking, looked, listened and fidgeted.

‘Hear that?’ said Kellas.

‘Yeah, sounds like a skylark, doesn’t it?’

‘We shouldn’t be able to hear a sound like that in the space between two armies. It’s a bad sign.’

‘Ah, if the Iraqis were going to put up a fight, they’d have done it by now.’

‘At this moment, they’re the ones I’m less concerned about,’ said Kellas. ‘Didn’t you notice what that Marine told us an hour ago? A bit of a problem around Zubair, he said.’

‘That’s Zubair.’

‘He also talked about “free-fire zones”.’

They all looked up. The sky was clear and silent, apart from the larksong.

‘We’ve got the orange panels on the vehicles,’ said Rafael, a little sulky now.

‘What is this, the new Ghost Dance?’ said Kellas, and laughed. ‘Bullets bounce off?’ His voice was high and he thought he sounded as if he was afraid. He was, and wished it didn’t bother him that the others might think it. He asked Yehia, who shrugged. He would go where Zac and Rafael went. They were paying him and he was the only interpreter.

‘Well, all those in favour of driving on,’ said Rafael. Everyone except Kellas raised their hands.

‘I could go with them, and you could drive back,’ said Astrid to Kellas.

Kellas watched her looking at him, with the apparent indifference which, he had learned, did not mean that she did not care, rather that she gave great weight to the responsibility of others for their own fortune.

‘I’d rather you stuck with me, of course,’ she said.

Since she’d joined him in Kuwait a few days earlier, he had found himself starting to cherish his ignorance of her inner nature. Yet it seemed so unlikely that he had learned patience. It seemed unlikely that he had learned to apprehend time, rather than the events and words of which time was made. He believed what Astrid had told him once, that you could not change, except by becoming more like you really are. Had he learned to see people and countries in time, or had it always been in him to do so? He unclipped the helmet strap, took it off, and ran his fingers through his hair. In the past, in situations like this, he had sometimes found himself the boldest
one. Those times it had been the ones with children and dear partners who’d been more cautious. This group had five children, two wives and a partner between them. Yehia alone had a wife and three children in Beirut. Their recklessness was a sign of the scale and lavish allure of this enterprise.

‘Four to one,’ he said. He struck his helmet with his knuckles three times and put it back on. ‘It’s fine. Let’s go. There, we brought democracy to Iraq, and it didn’t hurt at all.’

As they dispersed to their cars, Kellas called out that it was his and Astrid’s turn to drive in front. Kellas drove the Mitsubishi up onto the viaduct and in the mirror he saw the Tahoe pull in behind. Astrid was looking straight ahead. She felt he was watching her and smiled at him.

‘Did we bully you?’ she said.

‘Say something more fine,’ said Kellas. ‘I want to hear something that matters. I want to hear an old story. I hate the emptiness of this road. Are the hairs on the back of your neck sticking up?’

‘I like it when they do that. Usually it’s going into the woods at night that gives me that feeling. Do you know the story of Artemis and Actaeon?’

Astrid began to tell the story. Kellas put his hand in hers, and listened to the tale of how the goddess turned a huntsman who angered her into a stag, and how he was killed by his own dogs. After a while, in the silence of the desert, he felt his consciousness dividing; he was still Adam Kellas at the wheel of the car, watching the road ahead, and at the same time he was another, estranged version of himself, watching Kellas and Astrid as they drove. They looked peaceful and thoughtful, half-kind, half hungry, the sort of fortunate people in whom hope and defeat are still in balance –although you cannot tell, of course, in a moment’s watching. Perhaps they were dreaming a little. Gradually the watcher drew back, until Kellas and Astrid could no longer be distinguished as individuals; they were two dark, generic figures in the car. The watcher continued to extend his distance. The two cars became smaller and smaller,
shrinking into the landscape, and seemed to move more and more slowly, until in the black-and-white glow of his reticulated screen the watcher saw nothing but two dark spots, crawling like lice through the desert along the empty road.

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent
© 2008 by James Meek. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40003-9

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, by arrangement with Canongate Books Ltd, Edinburgh and New York.

First Canadian edition

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use through our Special Markets Department.

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
2 Bloor Street East, 20th Floor
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4W 1A8

www.harpercollins.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Meek, James, 1962–
We are now beginning our descent / James Meek.

ISBN 978-0-00-200856-3

I. Title.

PR6063.E445W4 2008 823’.914 C2008-900839-1

Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East – 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz

United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com