And so, when she had seen the ad on an unremarkable day in November, her personal Richter scale had flickered. She was having tea and toast at the time, at a counter by the window of a café at the end of Dublin’s Leeson Street. Breakfast in the café was her morning yoga, a slice of peace before the slog that lay ahead—she was a commuter, a worker, part of the flow and throng into town, to desks and phone calls and whining shredders. Holding a half-eaten piece of toast, smeared with jam from a plastic packet, she read the ad and blinked. It was an alert, a call from the deep vein of unpredictability that ran through her, like a seam of ore, invisible, but rich.
Before she had even put down the newspaper, she knew the job would be hers. She was sharp and efficient, a mean typist, and had an excellent manner with clients. Her reference would glow like a red hot coal, making the envelope smolder. She bit into her toast, startled by this hitherto unseen confidence in her own abilities. It suggested that she was underperforming. In her twenty-fourth year, at a counter in a window, the Irish Times had thrown down its cape—all she had to do was step out.
Her confidence had hit the mark: within weeks, the job was hers.
One day Leeson Street, the next Baghdad.
The days were long in the office, and so were the six-day weeks, with only Fridays off. Thea adapted slowly, wearing layers of spring clothes and wrapping half her breakfast in a paper napkin so she could eat it in the cold office mid-morning. The rest she could deal with because the rest she loved. Kim, in particular. Perhaps it was their situation that created a depth of understanding they might not have enjoyed anywhere else, but they believed they would have been close in any situation. Different enough to be compatible, they shared the same curiosity and a tendency to long-jump when small steps would do. It couldn’t be long before they discovered one another’s irritating foibles—how could they not, when they shared their hotel, workplace, transport, and social life, but the prospect didn’t worry them. Kim was smart and gutsy and great company; emerging from a bruising relationship in London, she had come to Iraq because it was about the only place to which her obsessive ex-boyfriend wouldn’t follow.
In the late afternoons they took to walking on the other side of the river, braving the erratic traffic and one of Baghdad’s busiest bridges to reach the quiet stretch of its bank. Here, where their conversations were unfettered by colleagues and hotel staff, they found their common ground, the yin and yang of their immediate friendship, and they discovered that both had been accused, back home, of profiting from another man’s war. Each felt guilty as charged.
“But if I am profiting from being here,” Kim said, “the salary is only a very small part of what I have to gain.”
Thea agreed. “So many people said to me that it must be for the money—why else would anyone come to a war zone except for the cash? Well, maybe because even a humble secretary can do more than work in a lawyer’s office or a travel agency, and for my part, I just desperately wanted to see beyond the carriage return of a typewriter. I know that’s greed too, especially given what’s going on, but it might as well be me standing here on this riverbank as anyone else.”
The evening sun was low. Kim stopped on the sandy track and shaded her eyes. The Tigris had turned pink. “I can sure live with being greedy if this is where it takes me.”
Reggie was also easy to like. An expatriate of long standing, he couldn’t remember when he had last lived in England, and his contributions to any conversation usually began, “When I was in the Congo/Argentina/Bratislava. . . .” His enthusiasm worked like a battery on his team, and his penchant for overly large yellow and orange shirts, hanging from his narrow shoulders, with contrasting orange and yellow ties made for quite a startling wake-up call every morning. Geoffrey, in contrast, tended toward the maudlin. He was there only and unapologetically for the money, but even that didn’t satisfy him: he moaned tunefully about overbearing bureaucracy, inadequate leave and missing his friends. Their contracts were tough on the homesick—no holidays for twelve months, and then only ten days’ leave before embarking on another year. It felt like self-imposed exile to Geoffrey, but Thea felt no draw, no pull for home—at least, not until one night, very shortly after she’d arrived, when the city started popping outside. Gunfire.
A zip of fear rushed over her, even as her friend knocked at her door. Kim hurtled in and made for the window. “What the hell’s going on out there?”
The sky was flashing, the air banging. They turned off the lights and stood to the side of the window, flinching with every bang and watching arcs of light flying skyward. It was the oddest feeling—helpless, nothing to be done, nowhere
