The Mountain Shadow (60 page)

‘And most importantly, you have to report to the checkpoint every day before noon, to get stamped,’ he said in conclusion. ‘That’s a must. If you’re here for a few days, and they see a single day missing, you’ll be detained. Have you ever had the feeling that you’re not wanted?’

‘Not recently.’

‘Well, if you miss a day, and they catch you, you’re going to feel like the
Universe
doesn’t want you any more.’

‘Thanks, Ankit. Doesn’t anyone in this war have a sense of humour?
The Universe doesn’t want me any more?
That’s such a depressing thought that I insist on one more of your special cocktails, immediately.’

‘Just don’t miss that checkpoint,’ he laughed, returning to the small bar in the lounge area.

He went back to the bar several times, I guess. I lost count after the third time, because everything after that was the same thing, somehow, like watching the same leaf float past on a stream, again and again.

I wasn’t doped. Ankit was a damn good bartender: the kind who knows exactly how drunk you don’t need to be. His voice was soft, kind and patient, although I had no idea what he was saying, after a while. I forgot about the mission, and the Sanjay Company.

Flowers so big I couldn’t put my arms around them tried to press my eyes closed. I was tumbling, slowly, drifting, almost weightless, in feathered petals.

Ankit was talking.

I closed my eyes.

The white flowers became a river. It carried me to a place of peace, among the trees, where a dog ran toward me, frantic with happiness, and pawed at my chest happily.

Chapter Thirty-Four

‘
D
AVIS
!
’

The dog scratched and pawed at the edge of the dream, trying to claw me back to that place, that sacred space.

‘Davis!’

I opened my eyes. There was a blanket over me. I was still sitting where I’d slept, but Ankit had put a pillow behind my head, and a blanket over my chest. My hand was in my jacket pocket, holding the small automatic. A deep breath told me that the golden vest was still in place.

Okay
.

There was a stranger stooping over me.

Not okay
.

‘Back off, friend.’

‘Sure, sure,’ the man said, straightening up and offering his hand. ‘I’m Horst.’

‘Do you often wake people up to meet them, Horst?’

He laughed. It was loud. Too loud.

‘Okay, Horst, do me a favour. Don’t laugh like that again, until I’ve had two coffees.’

He laughed again. A lot.

‘You’re kind of a slow learner, aren’t you?’

He laughed again. Then he offered me a cup of hot coffee.

It was excellent. You can’t dislike someone who brings you good, strong coffee, when you’ve been thirty-minute drunk only four hours before.

I looked up at him.

His eyes were sun-bleached blue. His head seemed unnaturally large, to me. I thought that Ankit’s coconut lime drinks were to blame until I stood, and saw that he had an unnaturally large head.

‘That’s a big head you’ve got on you,’ I said, as I shook hands with him. ‘Ever played rugby?’

‘No,’ he laughed. ‘You can’t imagine how hard it is to find a hat that fits.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘I can’t. Thanks for the coffee.’

I started to walk away. It was still in the half-light. I wanted to beat the dawn to my bedroom, and sleep a little more.

‘But you have to report, at the checkpoint,’ he said. ‘And believe me, it’s much safer for us just after dawn, than at any other time,
ja
.’

I was still wearing the flak vest marked PRESS. He was inviting me, as a fellow journalist. If I had to do it, it was better in company. Sleep no more.

‘Who are you with?’ I asked.

‘
Der Spiegel
,’ he replied. ‘Well, I’m freelancing for them. And you?’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Long enough to know the safest time to report to the checkpoint.’

‘Do I have time to wash up?’

‘Make it quick.’

I ran upstairs to my room, stripped off, had a cold shower, and was dried and re-vested in six minutes.

I came down the stairs in a jog, but found the lounge area empty. The windows of dawn light were at exactly the same intensity as the lights in the room: a light without shadows.

A soft, scraping sound stirred the stillness. Gardeners were working already.

I walked through to the long, wide veranda, directly above the open wound of lawns surrounding the hotel: a wound that the jungle ceaselessly sought to heal.

Seven servants were hard at work, hacking, chopping and spraying herbicide on the perimeter: the urban front line in the war with nature.

I watched them for a while, waiting for Horst. I could hear the jungle, speaking the wind.

Give us twenty-five years. Leave this place. Come back, after twenty-five years. You’ll see. We’ll heal it of all this pain.

‘I’d like to have a few of those fellows working for me,’ Horst said, as he came to stand beside me. ‘My girlfriend has a place in Normandy. It’s lovely, and all that, but it’s a lot of work. A couple of these guys would fix it up in no time.’

‘They’re Tamils,’ I said, watching them drift across lawns lit by hovering dew. ‘Tamils are like the Irish. They’re everywhere. You’ll find hard-working Tamils in Normandy, if you look hard enough.’

‘How do you know they’re Tamils?’ Horst asked suspiciously.

I turned to face him. I wanted another coffee.

‘They’re doing the dirty work,’ I said.

‘Oh, yeah, yeah,’ he laughed.

It wasn’t funny. I wasn’t laughing. He pinched his laugh to a frown.

‘Which agency did you say you’re with?’

‘I didn’t say.’

‘You’re a real secretive guy, aren’t you?’

‘The shooting is wallpaper. The real war is always between us, the journalists.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Horst asked nervously. ‘I just asked you who you’re with, that’s all.’

‘See, if I make friends with you, and I break a story, and then I find out you stole it from me, I’d have to hunt you down and beat you up. And that’s not good.’

He squinted at me. His eyes flared.

‘
Reuters!
’ he said. ‘Only you Reuters pricks are so stingy with a story.’

I wanted another coffee. Ankit appeared at my elbow. He was carrying a small glass of something.

‘I thought that a fortification might be required, sir, if you will forgive the impertinence,’ Ankit said. ‘The road you walk this morning is not kind.’

I drank the glass, discovering that it was sherry, and damn good.

‘Ankit,’ I said, ‘we just got related.’

‘Very good, sir,’ Ankit replied equably.

‘You there,’ Horst said to Ankit. ‘Can you find out, please, if any of these fellows have work permits for outside of Sri Lanka?’

I held Ankit’s response with a raised hand.

‘Are we gonna get going, Horst, before the bears wake up?’

‘Bears?’ he said, making it sound like
beers
. ‘There are no bears. It’s tigers, not bears. The Tamil Tigers. They’re absolutely crazy, those fucks. They all carry suicide capsules, in case they’re caught.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘They don’t seem to realise that when they do that, commit suicide like that, they make the other side even more determined to throw them out of the country.’

‘Are we gonna do this?’

‘Yeah, yeah, sure. Don’t set fire to your pants.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t set fire to your pants,’ he repeated crossly, crossing the lawn.

‘Already with the rules,’ I said, following him out onto the main road.

Fighting in Trincomalee had ceased, and a slender ceasefire had prevailed for weeks. The German staff of
Der Spiegel
had returned to their home offices for other assignments. Horst, an Austrian stringer, had stayed on.

He was holding out for a new story: one that he could break without competition. He was hoping, in fact, that the Tamil Tigers would launch an offensive in the area, and that his faded-blue eyes would be the first eyes on a new war.

He was a tall, healthy, well-educated young man, in love with a girl, probably a nice girl, who lived on a farm in Normandy, and he was hoping for more war in Sri Lanka.
Journalism
, Didier once said to Ranjit, the media baron,
the cure that becomes its own disease.

‘You haven’t got a camera?’ Horst asked, after we’d walked and talked about Horst for about fifteen minutes.

‘In my experience, checkpoints are allergic to any cameras but their own.’

‘True,’ he agreed, ‘but there was a severed head on the road, yesterday. The first one for a month.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And . . . if we see another one today . . . I’m not going to share the pictures.’

‘Okay.’

‘It’s not my fault that you left your camera.’

‘Got it.’

‘Just, you know, so we’re straight on that, okay?’

‘I don’t want your pictures of severed heads, Horst. I don’t even want to think about them. If there’s another severed head on this road, he’s all yours.’

There was another severed head on that road, only fifty metres further along.

At first, I thought it was a trick: a pumpkin, or a squash, shoved onto a pole as a macabre joke. In a few steps, I saw that he was a dead kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen.

His head was propped on a bamboo pole, driven into the ground so that the boy’s dead face was face to face with any living face that passed, on the main road.

The eyes were shut. The mouth was wide open.

Horst was adjusting his camera.

‘I told you so,’ he said. ‘I told you so.’

I started to walk along the road. He called out to me.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Catch me up.’

‘No, no! It’s not safe, alone on this road. That’s why I wanted to walk together. You should stay with me. I mean, for
your
safety.’

I kept walking.

‘Two, in two days!’ Horst said, as distance lost him. ‘Something’s up. I can feel it. I
knew
I was right to stay.’

He was clicking his camera.

Click-clack
.
Click-clack
.

Killing the kid was a crime, but spiking his head was a sin, and sin always demands expiation. My heart wanted to find a way to return the kid’s head to his parents, help them find the rest of him, somehow, and lay him to rest.

But I couldn’t listen to my heart. I couldn’t even lay his dead young head on the earth, which every instinct inside me cried to do. I had a vest full of gold and passports, and my own passport was as false as my journalist accreditation. I was a smuggler, on a mission, and I had to walk away.

Alone on the road I grieved for that kid, whoever he was, whatever he’d done. I walked on, finding my hard face again, trying to lose all thought of it in the jungle, bright in a brief halo of sunlight between storms.

Trees were plentiful, growing tall and strong in nurseries of shrubs and plants, some waist-high, some reaching to my shoulders.

The leaves shivered drops of the last rain onto the thick roots of the trees: devotees pouring scented oil on the feet of tree-saints, whose raised-arm branches, and million-hand leaves had prayed the storm from the sea.
Without trees to pray for it, there’s no rain
, Lisa once said to me, as we’d rushed out to enjoy a warm, monsoon rainstorm.

Winds from the sea pacified storm-shaken trees. Branches dipped and swayed, foaming leaves waving with the sound of surf on the shore of the sky. Birds hovered and swooped, vanishing in walls of green, and darting out again, their shadows glittering on the wet road.

Nature was healing me, as Nature does, when we let it. I stopped grieving for the lost kid beside the road, and the lost kid inside me, and I stopped saying the words
severed head
.

A car approached me from the north. It was a battered white sedan, with the headlights covered in stars of black tape. The driver was a woman. She was chunky. She was short. She was thirty. She was wearing a sky-blue hijab.

She stopped beside me and leaned over to roll down the window.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded.