‘Oh, by the way,’ said Bluett, ‘there’s one other thing I meant to ask you.’
Purnell was on the point of asking him not to smoke, but, maddeningly, he noticed that the cigar was unlit.
‘Oh yes,’ he replied. In only a matter of hours this wretched day would be over.
‘I jes wanna check that you fellows blocked that Arab woman, al-Walibi, from getting into the hall today.’
‘You mean Benedicte al-Walibi? I thought we’d told you: we really didn’t feel able to do anything there. She was vouched for personally by the French Ambassador.’
‘Sheee …’ said Bluett. ‘Of course the Frog vouched for her. She’s his fucking girlfriend. We don’t like the look of some of the people she’s been talking to lately.’
‘Well, it’s out of my hands. You’ll really have to take it up with the Speaker.’
Barlow had been on the phone to the
He feared her as British soldiers on the Northwest Frontier once feared the Afghan daughters, and their knives, and their traditional knowledge of how to cut a live human being. ‘I’m reely sorry,’ she said, after his initial evasions, ‘but I reely do feel you are going to be better off talking to me ‘cos I’ve been asked to do this piece and your name’s gonna be in it anyway.’
Barlow had asked her with a croak what the story was. ‘Well, of course it’s very embarrassing for me to talk to you like this,’ she said, and then recited what purported to be a recent series of events in Barlow’s life.
It was not the truth. It was an abstract impressionist representation: crude, impasto blotches that might or might not stand for an object in the ‘real world’. But she knew she had enough to go on, and Barlow knew it, too.
At length he said: ‘It’s all rubbish, and besides, it was ages ago.’
The reporter went for the crack. ‘It’s either all bollocks or it happened ages ago. It can’t be both.’
As when a stag is chased down the river, and his eyes roll, and the foam spackles his flanks, and the bracken and the alder hang in his antlers, and he drags himself to the bank and turns to face the music of the hounds in the knowledge that he can run no further, so Roger Barlow MP, almost fifty-one and pretty washed up, decided to speak his mind.
He thought of this woman, and all her ambition and aggression, and the pointless misery she was trying to cause him.
‘Oh honestly,’ he said, ‘why can’t you go and do something useful, like jump off a cliff?’ As the seconds ticked away, he improvised a series of alternative careers for his tormentor.
‘Where are they, anyway?’ said the first policeman to the second policeman, as they wandered through Norman Shaw North car park in the direction of the ambulance. ‘Are they all hiding in the back?’
‘Tell you what,’ said the second policeman, ‘I reckon we should have a bet on this.’
‘OK matey. Two pints of London Pride says yer gotta have a Koran in every ambulance.’
‘Done.’
‘Hang about,’ said the first policeman. ‘Is that the phone ringing in our booth?’ They stopped and listened hard, turning back to look at the little black hut by the metal boom. The phone stopped and started again.
‘I reckon it is and all.’ Hands behind back, they drifted in the opposite direction.
The first policeman looked up at the sparkling morning. The clouds were still high and fleecy, but getting a little greyer and heavier about the bottom.
Jason Pickel’s rooftop narrative had by now become so torpid and charged with horror that Indira, a sensible girl from Balham, was starting to feel quite tense.
‘You know what a holocaust is?’ said Pickel. Indira listened to the ambulance sirens in the square, and the unintelligible roar of the protesters.
Yeah, she said, it was a kind of terrible massacre, like what Hitler did to the Jews. She studied his hands. They were leaving damp marks on the barrel, but at least the safety catch was on.
‘No, that’s not a holocaust,’ he said. ‘In the ancient world a holocaust was when you sacrificed an animal and the flames took every part of it. It was wholly burned — holocaust — and every portion of the beast was offered to the god.’ When the M16 bullets hit the fuel tank of the Datsun Sunny, said Jason, that was a holocaust.
There were six young Iraqi men in the car. Then there was this ball of flame. It was so big and so close that he smelt burning hair and realized it was his own eyebrows. The hairs shrivelled up on the back of his hands, like the nature films of ferns growing, except in reverse. When he came to describe the fate of the Iraqis, how they were first caramelized, then carbonized, and how their molten fat ran in rivulets down the sides of their incinerated car seats, Indira took a decision. She was going to report Jason. Someone should be told about this guy before he did any harm.
The fires had scarcely died down, said Jason, when the demonstrations began. They came from all sides, men slapping their hearts and their heads. They surrounded the torched car and screamed defiance when the Americans tried to approach it. They stuck their faces as close as they could to the Robocop-like Kovac and others, noses to chinstraps, and the curses spewed from their stained brown teeth and tongues that vibrated in the pink cavern of their mouths like a furious bird of prey.
It was a wedding party, they said. How could the GIs have failed to see that?
It was a victorious five-a-side soccer team.
Or they had just all passed their legal exams. They were brothers, uncles, fathers, sons, and they had been killed in cold blood by the crass and cowardly conquerors. It wasn’t long before Captain Koch de Gooreynd came from his quarters and took charge. Shots were fired in the air. The mob drifted away. Jason was left with the car, and its contents, like something terrible left in the oven. Now he noticed Barry White, the British journalist, who at some stage had emerged from his ditch and was filling his notebook.
Jason was putting the geraniums back in a row and pathetically trying to patch up an earthenware pot.
‘Ah, excuse me,’ said the reporter, ‘could I have my phone back, please?’ The connection had been broken but a masochistic urge made him press the redial button.
The reporter was standing there with his arm held out as Jason listened first to the roaring of the electrons, and then to the effortful click as it dialled the phone number in Iowa. Someone picked it up.
‘Honey,’ said Jason. Whoever it was decided not to talk. After a short silence Jason disconnected and gave the satphone back. He stood in the orange dust, blinking back sweat with his singed lids, and jealousy began its throttling work on his gorge.
He wasn’t listening as the Brit journalist — about six feet away — had a conversation with the foreign desk of his newspaper. Slowly, however, it permeated his consciousness that a story was being composed. What newspapermen call a piece, an article, was being dictated, about him and in his very presence.
‘Yeah, OK, give me fifteen minutes,’ said White. ‘Tell you what, put me straight over to copy. Hello there, yes, Barry White for
Six Iraqis set off for a wedding yesterday morning.
They cleaned their shabby car. They put on their best suits.
They spent the day singing and dancing, as they celebrated a ritual as old as humanity, and tried to forget the misery which British and American forces have brought to their country.
And they were still singing when they came up to an American checkpoint at 5 p.m. local time.
They were told to stop.
They were ordered to get out of their car.
They were told to put up their hands and lie on the sand.
They were told to do these things in a language they did not understand.
They were screamed at by men who have no right, under international law, to be in their country.
