I shook my head and looked away, more disappointed than anything. All this grief, all this bloodshed, all this struggle: caused by an incontinent chimpanzee in a squeaky chair.
'They had a point.' I said.
The first shock was: his frailty. On the telly, during those annoying bloody broadcasts, he looked old, true enough. He looked old and calm and maybe a tad doddery, like a friendly old boy who'd had his share of an eventful life and more besides. He looked like the sort of human raisin who'd fall asleep halfway through his favourite soap opera but could shout and rant with the best if someone mentioned 'The War'.
He looked, in other words, like an old man with a lot of life left in him.
In the flesh, in that cold detention room, under strip lights that strobed just too fast to notice, he was a cheap zombie special effect from an art-student B-movie. Skin so paper-thin you could make out the veins beneath the surface, hands so withered they looked like finger bones dipped in molten plastic. His eyes were set so far back in his head the sockets looked like volcano calderas, ready to bubble-up with pus and rheum.
Nice image.
This close up, under these lights, without the benefit of makeup, he wasn't old. He was sick.
I remembered the photo I'd seen inside the Secretariat. The NATO Staff-Sergeant, sat with an expression of quiet seriousness, staring into the camera. Forty, forty-five years old, well-groomed, no-nonsense.
The man before me hadn't got older. What had changed about him had nothing to do with age. It was simpler than that.
He'd just… withered.
He saw me staring.
'The Lord has sustained me.' He said, like he could read my thoughts. With one hand he reached down to pluck a long coil of rubber tubing from a pocket on the side of the chair. 'The Lord has shown me the Way.'
'The Lord has taken a shit in your brain.' I told him.
The second shock was: his smile.
It wasn't friendly. It wasn't pure. It wasn't the beatific expression of extreme serenity that basked in the studio lights every Sunday in the weekly broadcast. What it was, was:
Fucking vicious.
'The Lord has given me life in the midst of death. He has scoured the world with plague and fire, and wiped away those who bore his mark, and only I – whose blood runs with impurity – have been spared by his hand. The Lord favours me, Englishman, and in the hour of my greatest need – when the arch-Satan stormed at my door – he has delivered me from evil.'
'The arch-Satan?'
'The arch-Satan.'
'That'd be me?'
He smiled again. He smiled and underneath the God-talk, underneath the brimstone bullshit, I think maybe I saw…
– yes, I'm sure of it…a rational man staring out. A rational man who knew the truth.
A rational man who wasn't such a nutter after all.
Just a great liar.
'What happens to the children?' I said, suddenly exhausted. My body ached. My head hurt. Felt like it always had. I couldn't be bothered any more – not with any of it. With my own journey, with the goals I'd picked-up en- route like a travelling orphanage, with the whole twisted plate of crap this stupid bloody journey had become.
Don't you fucking give up, soldier!
Training. Secret Intelligence Service. MI6. Drill Sergeants screaming and yelling, shattering conventional wisdom, plumbing the depths of each grunt's soul for reserves of anger, for animal resilience, for the snarling shadow-lurking wolf loping about in the pits of the mind.
'The children?' John-Paul said. 'Oh. Oh, yes. Oh, I see…'
Don't you fucking give up, soldier!
Blah, blah, blah-the-fuck-blah.
Not your problem, said Bella, and I believed her.
'That's it, isn't it?' The little man sniggered, chair squeaking. He carefully fitted a bung to one end of the rubber tube and drew back the fabric of his sleeve. A plastic canula, stoppered-up, sat in the crook of his elbow, lodged deep in the vein underneath. 'That's what it's for. That's why you came to get me.' He looked pleased with himself.
I scowled. 'Come again?'
'A little boy, was it? A little girl? Hmm? Did I… Did I steal one away from you? Some little blonde slut, eh? Some filthy little brat with his finger up his nose?
'Came all this way, did you, English? All this way to get back your kiddiewinks?'
Slowly, lip twisting, he fitted the tube to the end of the canula and pushed.
'Think you're the first, do you? The first disgruntled daddy to come get his brat?'
I could see the way his brain was working. It was logical, I supposed. It made sense. It was the same lie I'd told the scavs in Central Park; the same idea of aching loss, borrowed from Bella and Malice and all those others, who'd surrendered or deserted or handed over their own children.
It was the best rational reason for someone – someone like me – to do all that I'd done.
To clamber over piles of bodies. To cross oceans. To lock horns with the great Church.
It was so wrong it was funny.
'No.' I said. 'I don't have children. Never have.'
The old man's eyebrows furrowed together. He stopped fiddling with the rubber tubing, let it hang loose in his hands.
'Then… but. Then why? Why did you come after me?'
I laughed, and I admit it must have sounded manic. Even in my head, the stupidity was too much to bear. The arrogance. This dried-up old lizard, this piece of desiccated skin.
He thought I'd come all this way for him. He thought this thing, between him and me, was personal.
'I didn't.' I said in-between chuckles, which grew thicker and damper with each breath, until my eyes fuzzed with water and I could barely see. 'You silly old twat. I didn't.'
I said:
Listen.
Her name was Jasmine Tomas.
She was… she was more beautiful than a new moon reflecting off a perfectly still sea. She was so beautiful I spouted corny old movie bullshit like that all the time, and I could get away with it and not get even a little bit embarrassed. She had skin and hair the colour of coffee – one with cream, the other without – and curves in all the right places. When she laughed it was too loud and made people look, but they always looked then smiled, because when she laughed it was like… an infection. Like everyone caught it straight away.
We disagreed about almost everything, but we disagreed in a weird way. Like it meant we thought just the same as each other, but would go hammer and tong to disagree over details. Ha. The colour of wrapping paper. New music. Pretentiousness of art. We couldn't start a conversation without arguing. It was great.
We loved each other so much it scared the living fuck out of me.
An aide came shuffling into the room, then, as silent as death. He didn't speak. He wheeled a medical stand before him carrying a small steel machine with a glass front and a system of tubes dangling below it. I ignored him. I carried on talking.
A week before Jasmine Tomas moved into my flat, she told me to get rid of all the photos I'd taken of her. This was six years' worth. She said… she said when we lived together all our photos should be of both of us, or neither of us.
She said that sort of thing a lot.
The thing about Jasmine Tomas was, it would be easy to mistake her for a romantic. It would be easy to be fooled by the things she said, the gestures she made. And then just when you figured you'd got her pegged she'd switch on the footy, or tell a sick joke, or come home from work with stories of scalpels and infections. One time, I cooked Jasmine a stew. I mean, fuck… my job was to go overseas and kill stuff. I don't cook. Still, it turned out okay, you know? Cheese, leeks, you name it.
