World War Moo (5 page)

When his grandfather set him up in the villa overlooking a village just south of Dubrovnik, Geldof had hoped being British and red-headed would make him exotic and thus appealing to the opposite sex. All it made him was shorter than Zlatan, the man referred to as the village midget even though he was a perfectly reasonable height, and prone to scalding sunburn that sent his skin sloughing off in the same way his hemp allergy once had. He hadn't realized that Brits, before they got too busy killing each other to worry about the national obsession of a holiday in the sun, had been making their presence felt for years: soaking up the rays like hairy white lizards after a freezing desert night and demanding tea with milk, not a bloody slice of lemon, in voices that substituted volume for even the most rudimentary effort to learn a few phrases in the local language.

Geldof had tried to learn Croatian, but most people just laughed at his attempts before responding in flawless English. If they'd spoken binary, he would have been on much firmer ground. He'd plugged away, attempting to fake a convincing accent in lieu of learning the grammar, until one humiliating day in the baker's. While summoning up a vehement
h
in the back of his throat to pronounce the word for bread, he propelled a gob of phlegm onto the glass counter behind which they kept the cakes. He'd had to slink out through a gauntlet of tutting older women as the result of his final attempt to speak a foreign language slid to the floor. Further proof that he didn't fit in came when he posted an advert for the Croatian wing of Maths Club around the village. The poster started with a line saying, “If you think you have what it takes to join Maths Club, call the number below.” Beneath he arranged a series of infinite sums, integrals, trigonometry, and imaginary numbers, which, when solved and added up, gave his phone number. Nobody ever called.

The one benefit of having no friends was that he had time to catch up on all the movies and TV series he'd missed over the years. His mum had been opposed to every strand of popular culture save for those once deemed kooky—such as yoga, meditation, and other assorted Eastern mysticism—that the mainstream had now embraced. As a result, she'd forbidden television in the house. He'd been forced to watch what he could on his computer late at night, when she was otherwise occupied with riding his dad senseless in one of their tantric love marathons. Now he spent each evening and weekend plopped in front of the flat-screen TV, working his way through every list of classic films he could find online.

Biting his lower lip in concentration, Geldof set about teasing off a long sliver of peeling skin from his shoulder. Even the weaker March sun proved strong enough to cook his delicate flesh once the water had washed off the sun lotion he so carefully applied. Lost in the simple pleasure, he didn't notice the girl until her red toenails were wiggling in front of him. He looked up—gaze tracking along her long legs, flat stomach, and sumptuous breasts to land on her supermodel face—just as the skin separated with an audible rip. It dangled from his fingers, swaying in the breeze.

“What is that?” she said, her voice barely accented.

Geldof was already so red from the sun that she didn't notice him blush. He tossed the scrap over his shoulder and rifled his mental files for some of the ridiculous lies he'd used to disguise his condition during the flaky rash years. “There were some baby snakes here. Just a minute ago,” he blurted out. “They must have shed their skins. I lay down on them.”

She half-closed one eye, looking at the shoulder where many other alleged snake skins were still attached to his body, before saying, “Yes, those baby snakes are a problem in Croatia. I am Jelena. You are Geldof, aren't you? The boy from the book about the zombie animals. You were very brave.”

Geldof had forgotten that Lesley's book detailing their headlong and chaotic flight from the U.K. was due to be released around now. He couldn't recall doing anything brave; the way he remembered it, the whole bunch of them had fled screaming and flapping their arms at every confrontation. Still, he wasn't about to admit that.

“I just did what had to be done,” he said with a nonchalant shrug.

She was smiling now, her hip cocked toward him in a suggestive manner. Like most Croatian girls he'd observed from a distance, she was sixteen coming on twenty-five. “We are having a beach party tonight, from ten. You should come and tell us all about it.”

“I'll be there.”

“Excellent,” she said, and sashayed off.

He tried not to stare too obviously at her buttocks, as her friends were now looking in his direction. He'd never considered what his role in Lesley's memoir might mean for him. Given he'd received his first social invite in all the months he'd been here as a result, it seemed he might become something of a celebrity. With the first unstrained smile on his lips for weeks, he gathered up his towel. He had to resist the urge to skip back to the villa.

*   *   *

At first, the party went well. He'd been in Croatia long enough to know nothing started until at least an hour after the appointed time, so when he came down at 11:15, wearing a blue sweater and a pair of canvas trousers, the beautiful youths were trickling in. Off behind the portable stereo, stacked beer coolers, and plastic bottles of homemade
rakija
, a grizzled old man with gray hair that thrust out from between his shirt buttons was kindling the fire beneath a spit pig. Although life had long since fled its basted body, Geldof thought he saw its snout twitch and dead eyes roll toward him. He shuddered and looked away.

Jelena waved him over and thrust a beer into his hand. He took a long swig, trying not to screw up his face, and held the bottle down by his side where nobody could keep checking how much he'd consumed. He knew from sitting alone on his balcony, watching other parties and hoping somebody would wave him down, that Croatian mothers must have hard liquor instead of amniotic fluid sloshing around their wombs. It was the only way to explain how everyone seemed able to knock back endless amounts of beer and spirits and remain upright. To date, Geldof's experience of drinking had involved the odd glass of wine with dinner. Even a few mouthfuls made him lightheaded. He would have to be careful—particularly since his grandfather had called earlier to announce an unscheduled visit the next morning to discuss something important. He couldn't face the hardheaded businessman with a brain softened to mush by booze.

“So, what's it like to fight a zombie?” Jelena asked.

“Technically, they're not zombies,” he said.

“Why not?”

Horror and fantasy geeks had already got their knickers in a twist about the use of the term in the media, arguing that the British hordes didn't meet the classical definition and should be referred to as “infected.” However, since the preferred term of BRIT didn't convey the same sense of drama or peril as the emotive z-word, the geeks were ignored and left to froth at the mouth on their message boards. Geldof wholeheartedly agreed with the geeks.

“None of the animals or people rose from the dead,” he said. “They don't shamble about, groan, and slowly decompose—although there is another school of thought that says zombies needn't be undead, that the state of being a zombie is about the loss of humanity and individual thought, about being driven by a simple desire to infect others. Both of these definitions disqualify beings with this virus, since they appear to be capable of relatively normal behavior when there aren't any victims around.”

He sat back, confident he'd kick-started a long debate on the relative merits of the terms, thus sucking the others into his geeky world and improving his chances of having it off with Jelena.

“That which we call a shit, by any other name would stink as bad,” said one of the older boys who'd been playing water polo earlier. “That's Shakespeare. Well, an approximation of Shakespeare. We're studying him in English lit. It's irrelevant what you call them. They still want to kill us all.”

Everyone nodded in agreement. Geldof pretended to vigorously scratch either side of his nose with his index and middle finger. He was really giving the smartarse boy a two-fingered salute, which was not as well known internationally as the single-digit insult. The response, irritatingly delivered in perfect English, had derailed his plan.

“Never mind what to call them,” Jelena said. “Tell us what happened.”

And so Geldof began talking about what it was like to live through a zombie animal apocalypse. At first, it felt good to tell his story: the craziness of the early days, the evacuations, the encroaching animals, and the constant bickering between his mum, Fanny, and their meat-obsessed neighbor, David. Others, boys and girls alike, arranged themselves nearby and leaned over to listen. They laughed out loud when he described getting his hands stuck in the side of an infected cow during the abortive cow-tipping episode. He'd never had so many people intent on his every word. When somebody handed him another beer and
rakija
, he took them, fearful of breaking the spell cast by the sparks floating up from the crackling fire, the yawning vastness of the starry sky above, and the convivial company he'd so sorely lacked. The liquor burned his gullet when it went down; his novice spluttering was greeted with encouraging thumps on the back.

It all began to go sour when, inevitably, he got to where people began to die. His head already swimming, he snagged a third beer as he laid out how his mum met her end at the very snouts of the snuffling, ravenous pigs she'd refused to eat. He glanced at the pig as he spoke, convinced it had winked at him. By the time he narrated how Brown shot his dad in the Channel Tunnel as they fled, he'd sloshed down another two beers. His words were now slurred, his voice a flat monotone. There was no more laughter; of his audience only Jelena remained and she was casting glances around, looking for some way to escape this torrent of pain. Geldof knew he was losing her, but he couldn't stop. He didn't want to stop. For all those months, he'd had to internalize his grief. David's wife, Mary, still living with Geldof after their escape, was coping with the loss of her husband and twin sons by refusing to talk about it; Lesley and Terry were on the other side of the Atlantic getting on with their lives; even Nadeem, the only surviving member of Maths Club, shied away from Geldof's attempts to express how he felt on their Skype chats.

Finally, near spent, he tried to catch Jelena's eye: a task made impossible by his swaying, double vision and her fixed stare at the ground.

“You'd think the worst thing would be that I got my dad's brains on my face,” he said, slapping his cheek and running his fingers down to illustrate. “Right in the face. But it wasn't. At least I had a chance to talk to him, you know? To rebuild our relationship a bit. But my mum. My infuriating, hectoring mum. I was such a little shit to her. I never got a chance to tell her I loved her. I'd give anything to do that: to say good-bye, to say sorry.”

He fell silent, the full stop firmly placed on his tale of woe.

“I'm sorry,” Jelena said. “I have to go.”

She slipped away, leaving him marooned in an island of stillness as those who'd once surrounded him danced to Gogol Bordello, a crazed gypsy punk band the kids of the village seemed to adore. He watched her join in the dance, which seemed all the more frenetic as they exorcised the unhappiness with which he'd contaminated them.

“You wanted a cheery little adventure story, didn't you?” Geldof whispered.

He drained the rest of his beer and rose unsteadily, intent on making it to bed before he barfed. His gaze fell on the pig, now dripping crackling juices into the roaring flames. Again, it seemed to be staring at him as it revolved; grinning as it mocked his pain and taunted him for his loss.

“You killed my mum, you malodorous swine,” he said.

Without any conscious decision to do so, he broke into a weaving run and launched himself through the air to catch the pig square with a thumping tackle. The supports of the spit gave way. He landed on top of the evening's dinner and began to dish out flailing punches. The pig's crisped skin split under his blows and scalding fluid spattered his forearms. He was faintly aware that the dancing had halted and every youth in the party was gaping at him as his fists pistoned in time to the beat. He only stopped when he became aware of heat around his ankles. He looked down to see his feet were still in the fire and his trouser legs were beginning to smoulder. He leapt up, leaving his vanquished foe on the ground, and grabbed a half-full glass. As he was about to throw it on his trousers, a strong hand grasped his wrist. The old man shook his head and pointed at the glass. Geldof had been about to toss hard liquor onto the fledgling fire. The old man poured a bottle of beer over Geldof's feet and put an arm around his waist.

“Time for you to go home,” he said.

“I can't go home,” Geldof said, his words barely audible, and let the man half carry, half drag him back up to the villa.

 

SEVENTEEN
DAYS TO EXCISION

 

5

Despite his throbbing head and the burns clamoring for attention on his limbs, Geldof felt surprisingly untroubled as he sat on the steps of the villa the next morning, waiting for his grandfather to arrive. He wasn't upset that he hadn't copped off with Jelena. Deep down he'd known it would end that way, and he'd pretty much accepted he would remain a virgin for life. In many ways, it was a blessing. Virginity was only a burden if you entertained serious notions of the relief you would feel upon getting the three-hundred-pound gorilla off your back. Once you acknowledged you would be carrying it around for the rest of your life, you stopped noticing your spine was concertinaed under the weight. Yes, he still thought about sex, and released the pink pressure valve as and when required, but he could go weeks without feeling the urge to masturbate—which must have been some kind of Guinness Record for a boy of his years.