We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (6 page)

‘The gun? Who are you with,
Stars and Stripes?
’

‘I hope those gloves help you with the cold,’ said Astrid, looking into Miriam’s eyes. ‘You need to be more careful with your gear.’

‘Appreciate it,’ said Miriam faintly, held by Astrid’s gaze. ‘I’ll send them on when I get back.’

‘Don’t,’ said Astrid. She walked across to the Uazik she’d been travelling in and reached into the back for her rucksack. Kellas listened for the tiny sound from her lungs as she lifted it but at the same moment Miriam’s travelling companions called to her and their engines started.

‘I have to go,’ said Miriam. ‘Are you travelling with her?’

‘Astrid. Astrid Walsh. She works for
DC Monthly.’

‘You do understand what a liability she is.’

‘Do you know her?’

‘She just dropped a fucking gun out of her pocket. That’s a sackable offence in any outfit I know. You can tell she’s a flake. A military groupie. I know her type. She’s one of those women who doesn’t have any women friends. You should wait here for another convoy.’

‘She’s OK,’ said Kellas. ‘Eccentric.’

Miriam pressed her lips together and stared at Kellas, holding her breath. She let it out. ‘I see. I would say keep your distance, but – I see.’ They wished each other good luck and Miriam went back to her convoy.

That afternoon Kellas and Astrid’s cars crossed the Anjoman pass. The road was a looping trail of black rocks and compacted snow. On either side the snow cover lay a few inches thick. As they traversed the highest point a blizzard came in and twice they had to get out to help push the Uaziks through. Kellas and Astrid stood next to each other, Alex and Rustum on either side, with their hands pressed against the Uazik’s rear door, and put their weight against it. Their lungs hurt and their heads spun with the altitude. The drivers said that, within a week, only horses would be able to make it across. On the way down Astrid tried to rest her head on Kellas’s shoulder and doze, but the jolt of the road kicked her awake each time. When they were in their sleeping bags at nightfall in a guesthouse at the top of the Panjshir valley, Kellas watched Astrid asleep, and saw how the four frown lines on her forehead sharpened into being, then were smoothed away, then returned.

The next morning, as they were packing up to leave, Astrid’s mood changed. Her face closed and she told him curtly that she was staying behind. She’d come to Jabal later.

Kellas kneeled there over the maw of his rucksack, his things spread around him, the winter clothes, the bottle of whisky for the
Citizen
correspondent he was relieving, the books. He felt a strange dryness on his tongue and realised that his mouth was hanging open. He cleared his throat and asked her what the matter was. Astrid looked at him like a beast of prey for whom he was not prey, cold, distant, proud in herself, without the faintest glow of human social need. She didn’t answer him and turned away.

Kellas got into the Uazik without her and they drove off. The ride shook him hard with two instead of three in the back of the car, without Astrid’s body to brace him. He wasn’t troubled by the sharp shift in her temperament, but he was surprised. He spent the morning
thinking about Astrid, and why she meant so little to him. Rattling down the Panjshir his thoughts darkened. The mountains were closer and steeper and cast more persistent shadows. By the afternoon he was full of the sense of lonely cheatedness that comes when all the favourite characters in a drama are dead, yet the drama continues. When he tried to remember Astrid’s face, to try to understand why he didn’t care, he wasn’t sure that he was remembering it well. It would be easier if she were there. The only thing he was sure he was remembering right was the tiny sound that came from inside her as she hoisted a load onto her back. He listened to his memory of the sound of the life in her until it got dark and the Uaziks’ headlights swept at last onto a metalled road.

A
n automated voice at Heathrow called the boarding of Kellas’s flight. He passed the last cluster of shops before the walk to the gate. There was a bookshop, and he had nothing to read. He stood a few feet from the entrance, staring at the first table, which was stacked with copies of an American revelatory liberal tract called
From Plato to Nato
. If he went any closer there was a risk he might see copies of a book with a green-and-red cover that he had been avoiding since it was published, although he had read it twice. He’d seen it last night, at the Cunnerys’. It’d been brought out; it’d been signed. Conversations had followed and events had occurred, the memory of which snapped at and menaced his footsteps. He turned away from the bookshop and walked to the departure gate, empty-handed, injured and eager for champagne.

He walked down the gangway into the electric smell of the aircraft and the whine of the generator. For a moment he was part of the tired shuffling in the plane’s porch, a procession fenced-in toughly by the bared teeth of the crew, until they found him to be one of the privileged, and directed him left into the first class cabin. The passengers already boarded there lolled in bloated loungers, sunk in the pleated folds of dyed cowhide like child kings. He found his place by the window. In the aisle seat next to him was a tall, heavily-built woman in her twenties wearing pearls and an expensively tailored suit the colour and texture of white water-lily petals. Here in the nose of the 747 there was so much space that she didn’t need to move her feet, let alone stand
up, as he came past her. She looked up from the book she was reading. He could see it was Chinese or Japanese. She smiled at him and they said ‘Hi’ to each other. Kellas fastened his seatbelt. He fidgeted with the buckle and bit his nails and sweated. He was not a bad flyer. It was the ground that was making him ill. The longer the aircraft stood at the gate, the more rituals, the hot towels – why did people wipe their faces with them? Did they have dirty faces? – the more calm drivel from the pilot, the more unlikely it seemed that this lumbering, thin-skinned metal crucifix stuffed with travellers could fly him off the island and across the ocean and away from the shame that was growing in him. Like prayer beads through his fingers, he felt and counted the things he had done and said at the Cunnerys’. It was still possible that – if a Mr Kellas was on board, could he make himself known? He anticipated the cold of the handcuffs against the skin of his wrists, and their weight. He looked over his shoulder. There were fast feet down the aisle, almost running, and dark cloth. It was one of the cabin attendants. He looked at Kellas, put his hand to his mouth, bent his knees, reached out and touched him on the shoulder. ‘Did I frighten you? Oh, I’m ever so sorry. I’m in such a hurry today! Everything all right?’

‘It’s OK, I’m fine,’ said Kellas, feeling he’d spilled something on himself. He was placing the eight guests around the Cunnerys’ table. Cunnery to his left. Sophie M’Gurgan on his right. Lucy Flagg facing him, Pat M’Gurgan next to her, Joe Betchcott in the too-tight sweater and Margot and Melissa at the far end. Your own mind was a hard thing to manipulate: it had so many automatic processes. Where he wanted to tab it was the question about Afghanistan to which he’d given such a plain answer. He would rather hold that as the start point of this sagging weight of guilt, heavy on his stomach. He would have preferred to keep the other details as another class of remembered things, moated from the rest. But the mind was democratic, a synthesiser. It connected. He remembered, for instance, that Sophie had watched how he looked at Lucy’s cleavage, sharp and
young in the deep bare scoop at the front of her small dress. That everyone, and not only Lucy, had heard him tell her that she looked sexy. That he’d called Joe Betchcott ‘a fucking fascist wanker’ long before the war question had occurred, when he only had one drink in him. The hardest thing was that he hadn’t been drunk at any time. He needed to drink now, to quell the inertia of the organising mind. He needed to be controlled. He needed to put it out of himself that his answer to the war question had anything to do with him coming into the dining room and seeing the pounds of bright cutlery there, the multiple forks, and him picking up one and putting it down and remarking to Cunnery about the surprising lack of silver snail tongs in a way that sounded sarcastic, envious and sly. Could he fairly malign the only child Cunnery for putting his deceased parents’ silver out for dinner guests? Was it that, as an avowed socialist, he was supposed to have sold the silver and donated the proceeds to the struggle? Perhaps. Yet as long as Cunnery had the tableware, Kellas would have taken greater offence if the places had been set with pressed steel knives and forks. Kellas’s soul hadn’t been pinched in the same way at other feasts. It had been a kind of lavish show when Rab Balgillo held his wedding reception at his father-in-law’s farm in Orkney a few years back, and this had seemed no worse than generous. Balgillo had spent, and his family had spent, and the bride’s family had spent; everyone had spent, including Kellas, and the whole long weekend in Orkney had been nothing but joy. The M’Gurgans were profoundly in debt at the time, and Kellas had been earning well as a freelance. It had taken him days of persuasion to get Pat and Sophie to agree to take his money to cover their expenses on the trip and then to promise that they would never try to pay him back, or mention it again. The feast days had flowed out to gather them; Kellas and Katerina had flown from Prague to Edinburgh, hired a car and driven to Duncairn to stay with Kellas’s parents. Pat and Sophie had joined them and they’d driven up to Thurso together and taken the ferry to Stromness from there.

It’d been midsummer in the north and the sun scarcely set. They’d spent their nights suffused in red and gold. Although Katerina was by some way the most beautiful person at the wedding, this was not meaningful in the evening light; in the radiance all human shapes and skins seemed to realise a dearly-held intention implicit in their being. Pat, Sophie, Kellas, Katerina, Rab, his bride Leslie and the artist Hephzibah Cooper lay in the long grass by the standing stones, listening to the insects, tickling each other with sedge and talking nonsense about the universe and the islands. When the wind blew it was warm and carried the smell of peat and salt water. Kellas spent a long time gazing at the thin gold chain on the back of Katerina’s neck while Hephzibah talked about how the stones went three yards underground, and somebody asked her how she knew, and she said Rab had told her, and Rab denied it. The voices and laughter came to Kellas through the waving seed heads and he listened, waiting for the next dart of wind to move Katerina’s hair and for her to put it back in place.

The party was held in and around a barn, decorated with the farmer father-in-law’s real hay and with the father-in-law’s ponies saddled and haltered for the guests to ride. The guests had been instructed to dress Western. Kellas and Katerina wore jeans and checked shirts, with cowboy hats and sheriff’s stars from a toy shop in Kirkwall. Sophie had found hand-stitched boots, an embroidered shirt, a bootlace tie and a real Stetson; Pat glowered as Pancho Villa, with bandoliers and a sombrero and a plastic moustache six inches wide. The band played till two and Katerina danced with a guest dressed as a cactus. Only his face showed, the costume was entirely rigid, and halfway through the Gay Gordons, he fell over and rolled around the floor, kicking his feet like an overturned beetle.

By four a.m. the sun was well above the horizon and Kellas, Katerina, M’Gurgan, Sophie, Hephzibah, Rab and Leslie were drinking on the floor in the front room of Leslie’s house. Somebody had asked M’Gurgan what Kellas’s parents’ place was like and
M’Gurgan had asked whether they’d heard about the cat. He had the storyteller’s beckoning smile on him as he said it and when he said to Kellas ‘You tell the story’, Kellas said ‘No, you do it.’

‘We’ve come back from the pub,’ said M’Gurgan, ‘and we’re sitting in the kitchen. All the women have already gone upstairs and Adam’s dad comes in all ready for bed, which is quite an operation. He spends an hour patrolling the house making sure everything’s switched off, the doors are double locked, the heating’s turned up to tropical. The lasers are primed. You know, stakes coming out of the walls to impale intruders. So he’s done his rounds, and he’s standing there in an Albanian dressing gown and a tasselled cap from Uzbekistan, which he only wears when Adam’s there ’cause that’s what Adam gives him for presents when he comes back from one of his assignments to shitholes. And Adam’s dad says to us: “Can you make sure, if the cat comes in, you don’t let it out again?” And he shows us how to lock the cat door, and off he goes to bed. The allotted task seems simple enough, and we go on talking. Couple of whiskies. After a while there’s this sound from the back door. Now I’ve heard cats come through cat doors before. I have experience, and I know, they’re very lithe creatures. It doesn’t matter how big they look; they slip through that little opening with just a wee clatter, and they’re in. But this sound is different. It isn’t a clatter. We hear the “clat”, and we’re waiting…and there’s no “ter”. So we go and take a look. The cat is gigantic! It’s the size of a sheep. And it’s stuck halfway through the cat door, with its head and front legs through, and its hind legs and arse hanging out the back. It looks like a lion that’s tried to jump through a quoit. So I ask Adam what the hell this Gargantua is and he says his parents have only just got the animal, this is the first time he’s seen it. So we open the door, and the cat just moves with it, like this. Then Adam goes outside, and we close the door, and he puts his hands on the cat’s arse and pushes, and I take the cat’s front legs in my hands and start to pull. And Adam keeps saying “Don’t hurt him!” and I’m trying to pull delicately, and the
cat looks at me very calmly and sinks its claws into my hands. Deep. I jump back and bang my head and start cursing the cat and Adam says “Not so loud, my dad’s a light sleeper.” I’m trying to staunch the blood from my wounds and then I see it’s looking bad with the cat. It’s making these little panting sounds, like two voles fucking. I imagine. Meanwhile Adam’s getting really agitated and I have an idea: we’ll use some butter to grease the cat. Adam starts rooting around and all he can find is a bottle of extra virgin olive oil. And this is when I know the kind of lifestyle he has because he starts drizzling the olive oil over the cat. You know – like it’s a rocket salad. I’m waiting for him to start shaving the Parmesan. So I massage the oil into the cat’s skin and we take our positions again, he pushes, I pull, the cat screams blue murder and it just shoots out of the cat door and into the kitchen. The next thing is Adam’s father comes storming in, in his Lebanese night attire, shouting at us for all the noise we’re making. We explain that the cat got stuck in the cat door. Adam’s dad looks down at this enormous mutant cat, panting on the floor, its paws covered in my blood and its belly all smeared in extra virgin olive oil like some avant garde north London starter, and he says: “I’ve never seen this animal before in my life!”’

On the plane, Kellas laughed out loud. McGurgan had still been wearing the false moustache when he was telling the story. A cold hard bolt shot into Kellas’s laughter and he felt the muscles around his mouth flatten and his lips closed. After what had happened, after what he had done, it didn’t seem possible he could ever be in a room with the M’Gurgans again.

The Boeing rolled back off the stand. From where Kellas was sitting, so close to the front, the moan of the engines when the crew spun them up sounded far away. Once the aircraft was turned round and began to move forward under its own power, Kellas felt the shame start to melt inside him. They joined the queue of aircraft waiting to use the runway. Tall tailfins moved across each other like sails crowding a harbour, and the narrow strips of cockpit
window darkened and twinkled in the sun like the frowns of racing beings before the charge to speed. When the 747 carrying Kellas swung into the compass degrees at the start of the runway, and the sound of a sudden rush of burning kerosene into engines the size of blast furnaces reached his ears remote and muffled, like thunder in the next county, his shame at what he had done was almost gone. When the aircraft accelerated and he was pressed into his seat and the frame of the 747 shook a little and glasses in the galley chattered together like crystal teeth, the shame vanished, and when the aircraft parted from the ground, the faces and sounds of the night before in Camden stayed there. The old island had shed him to the mercies of the air like a gnarled tree shedding a dot of blossom and although he was still as doomed as anyone his doom had a vector and a velocity taking him away from the witnesses to what he had done.

The aircraft banked as it climbed. Kellas looked through the window and back to the wings. He liked to watch them bend, flap a little at the wingtips as they took the strain of turning the big ugly jumbo through the thick air, and streaks of vapour like smoke shoot from the leading edge. The sky was crowded, the pilot told them, and they would level out low over the West Country for a while before they climbed to the high cold of the transatlantic jetway.

On the lands below there were shawls of frost on the rises, and lines of snow in the shadows unmelted from a week ago. Britain held a baseline greenness even in midwinter. Distance conferred mystery on the place, on any place. From here you couldn’t tell it was an island; it had a scale to it, a rumpled, hazy majesty. One thing that happened from ten thousand feet was that people only existed on the ground if you imagined them. Kellas could make out the half-legible Braille of villages and farms down there, but he couldn’t imagine the people in them. From this height, it was easier to place King Arthur in the mist lapping at the Welsh Marches, and Titania and Oberon bowered by those fluffy copses, than to populate the market towns with the real millions, one by one. The best
you could hope for from a stranger looking down, an American or Arab or African who’d never visited the island, was that they’d take it for more than Airstrip One; more than the lounge where Elvis meets Tintin when each is on his way to somewhere else. That they’d construct some decent facsimile of life below in the grass, brick and grey stone, perceive the human grain making up the fabric of the view. Otherwise what could the eye see as it looked down on a strange land from so high, except history instead of yesterday, prophecy instead of tomorrow, and a today that was either a view, or a target.