Eleven Days (23 page)

‘Step away from the door now!’

The two punks laughed and Mohican swung the padlock and just as quickly snapped it back. When Geneva flinched, he burst out laughing. ‘You cunts,’ he said. ‘Think you can just come in here and there’ll be no consequences?’

Carrigan glanced down at Geneva, saw her face reddening, her hands twitching at her sides. She tightened her grip on Emily’s bag. Carrigan looked behind him, noticing that the crowd was becoming more animated and that there would be no way out in that direction. The two punks and the door were their only option.

He was trying to decide the best course of action when Geneva launched herself at Mohican. The man swung with the padlock as she entered his space. Carrigan saw her duck, missing the ridged metal by only a few inches, then swing upwards with her baton, smashing it hard into Mohican’s crotch as the padlock crashed into the wall.

Carrigan was already moving on the other man, using the full weight of his body to force him back. A sharp stinging pain burned through his ear as the man’s jaw clamped shut over it. Carrigan felt something rip, turned to see Noose grinning with bloody lips and smashed his truncheon into the man’s stomach. Noose went down without a sound and Carrigan placed his shoe on the man’s neck, pinning him to the floor.

He could see some of the others starting to creep up on them, not sure whether to join the fight or just watch, and then all he could see was Geneva in a blur of motion as she swung her truncheon at Mohican’s neck, causing him to stumble, grab his throat with both hands and drop the padlock. She used one foot to shunt it away, delicate as a dancer, and then swivelled and kicked Mohican in the chest. He tried to grab her legs and she took out her pepper spray and pressed down hard on the nozzle. Mohican let out a long agonised scream but Geneva didn’t stop, bent over him, aiming the stinging mist directly into his eyes.

Carrigan took his foot off the other man’s neck and grabbed Geneva. ‘That’s enough!’ he shouted, pulling her away with one hand while using the other to open the front door.

The street light and cold air rushed in and Carrigan took a couple of deep breaths as he pulled Geneva through the door. She looked back once, her face twisted into a scowl. Carrigan remembered Karlson’s comments from yesterday, felt his body start to ache and moan with pain, the sudden enervation as the adrenalin disappeared from his system.

Something exploded on the path next to them, spilling its contents onto the cracked paving stones. Carrigan looked down and saw a trail of baked beans splattered across his shoe, the tin torn and twisted on the ground. Something else hit his shoulder. He looked up and saw an ashtray spinning through the air and ducked just in time.

‘Run!’ he shouted, grabbing Geneva by the hand as more items began raining down from the high windows of the squat. They wove through the front garden avoiding chair legs and potted plants, empty tea mugs, planks of wood and a shopping trolley which just missed Carrigan, buckled and bounced and glanced his thigh. He saw Geneva stagger as a stone stung against her shoulder and he grabbed her and pushed her through the gate.

They made it into the car, shaking, breathing heavily, staring blankly at the road ahead. They both jumped in their seats as something smashed against the roof of the car. Geneva started the engine and was about to release the handbrake when the back window exploded in a shower of glass and noise. Carrigan looked through the gaping hole and saw a hundred people, maybe more, spilling into the street – a few were chasing after them but the rest had turned their attention to the Tesco Express, hurling objects and piling against the windows, and then he heard more breaking glass and the sharp stuttering whine of the shop’s alarm system as the mob piled in.

‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,’ Geneva shouted, smashing her fist into the dashboard.

Carrigan turned towards her but she was staring back at the squat.

‘I can’t fucking believe it,’ she said, reaching for the door handle.

Carrigan grabbed her arm. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘I’ve got to go back there. I dropped Emily’s bag. Shit.’

Carrigan eased his grip and when Geneva turned in her seat she saw that he was smiling.

He slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out the small black notebook.

Geneva’s eyes widened and a smile cracked her face. She took the notebook and turned it over in her hand, tilting it so that it caught the overhead bulb-light. The notebook was a Moleskine, bound shut by a piece of black elastic. Geneva slid her fingers underneath the strap and snapped it open. The pages smelled of damp and hairspray. She flicked through pages of scrawls and lists, internet addresses, random notes, phone numbers, and then she stopped.

This was a different section of the notebook, demarcated by several blank pages before it. She stared at the page on the right. There were only seven words, written in large chunky letters, a heading of sorts:

Em & N’s Peru Trip – September 2011

He’s with me, by my side, but I don’t really see him nor feel his presence. He may as well be a tree, or a dog that follows you around because no one else will love it. But even dogs can be useful. Sometimes it’s the dogs that tell us where to look.

That first night we slept on the rocky ground, as far away from the hanging trees as possible, and in the morning we set off along the road, hoping to find help at the next village.

He has a map and a tattered guidebook and a sure sense of where he is going. He says if we leapfrog across the highlands, village to village, we’ll be able to catch up with the bus. Otherwise, it’s a two-week wait until the next one. Of course, all he wants to do is go back to the bars and alleyways of the town to drink and tell his tale to gape-eyed college girls and gap-toothed Scandis and watch them swoon and melt but it doesn’t bother me any more, at least not in the way it used to.

We hitch rides in the backs of ancient pick-up trucks, the kind of thing you expect to see in a museum, belching black smoke and diesel stink, us rolling around in rusty beds among straw and farm equipment and animal shit. Each truck or car only goes as far as the next hamlet. These are the limits of their lives. The rest of the world seems cut off from this high arid plateau but, of course, that’s only a romantic illusion – something we like to tell ourselves – if you look closer, if you can be bothered, you can see it seep through every crack of rock and bend of river.

It didn’t take us long to understand that this wasn’t an isolated incident. That the trees of the high country carried familiar fruit and that many villages were empty and abandoned like the one we’d stumbled upon.

On the second day the smell came back and this time there was no mistaking it for some natural occurrence. The back of my throat was sore within minutes. My skin felt hot and prickly. He coughed and popped some pills and pretended not to notice but I could see him fighting back tears.

The villages are strung out along these impossible peaks, fifty or seventy or a hundred miles between them, small groupings of mud huts and tin shacks, crumbling alleyways reverting to dust, leaning brick buildings and always, at the bottom of every ravine, the skeleton wrecks of smashed cars, a constant reminder of what we all want to forget.

The villages are beautiful in their simplicity and setting but most of them are deserted.

There are old men sitting on stones in town squares and stray dogs that bark and sneer when they see us approach. But everyone else is gone. Most of the villages are empty and the ones that aren’t, all slammed doors and dark suspicious glares. The old man we spoke to, or at least I tried speaking to in my crappy guidebook Spanish, just shrugged and flickered his fingers and waved as if to say they’d all flown away.

There’s something very wrong here. He refuses to admit it, refuses to even have that conversation and the few people we do stumble on seem to share his reticence. He keeps telling me how much he hates it here. Hates everything about it – the food, the backpacks digging into our sides, the miles of stumbling up and down hills, the endless sun-baked hours waiting for a truck or car to come by.

But I don’t feel like that at all. This thin meagre air suits my lungs perfectly, the twisting hills and treacherous slopes strip the fat and drift I accumulated in the city. It’s as if every part that was not a true part of me is finally slipping free into the high clean air. I feel something strange and exciting and I don’t quite know what it is or how to express it. With each place we stop at, with each broken conversation and whispered warning, with each new story, I begin to understand what is happening here and why.

I try to interest him. In London this is exactly what would goad him into action but here, in Peru, Nigel has become remote and distant and as different from his normal self as this landscape is to the glass and concrete of the city.

There is barely any life here at all. It is almost like the surface of another planet. Barren and cold and stark. The thin air and rocky ground deter everything but the hardiest weeds, the animals all look like shrinkwrapped skeletons and the people too seem stunted, closed in on themselves, each like a fist. Their mouths are tight but their eyes give them away. The shrugs and grudging smiles hide a deep unreckonable desperation and you feel that anything can happen at any time.

But people like to talk. People like to tell stories. We are such a curiosity to them we may as well be from another galaxy and, eventually, words are spoken, stories told.

We hear about the mines. That’s all we hear. How the mines have taken over the region. The foreign mines where no one understands what the foreman says but they all understand the cruel smack of his stick. We sit and listen as they tell us of rivers that float with death and strange shiny chemicals that swallow the sun. They say men come at night and take their children. That there are things in these mountains woken up out of millennia-long slumber. They talk of seeing the paramilitaries again, the rumble of boots and cruel smiles and bloodstench. How they thought these days would never come again but here they are.

Everywhere we go we hear whispers and rumours of a fenced compound high in the mountains and people say the days of war and blood are coming back and I can tell from their faces and the agitation in their muscles that they’ve waited their whole lives for this. They tell us about death threats and assassinations. They speak of the disappeared, ghosts walking the silent hills, demons roaming the Inca night. They complain about their persistent bloodcoughs, the black dust they bring forth every morning from their lungs, and they shrug and look up at the sky as if it owed them an answer and then they look back down at the holy ancient ground that has been stripped from their very feet and it makes me feel mad and restless and pale-eyed and he’s not even interested, he just skulks in corners and sits on the backpacks and smokes his cigarettes.

He makes me sick. I can’t stand to be near him any more. Even the way he moves his hand up to his jaw, that slow deliberate gesture, repeated through hours and days, in buses and sleeping bags, drives me crazy.

But he makes me understand myself better. He’s like a mirror in which I can see my former life. All those long and wasted years behind me. The posturing and pretending in small hot flats as if we, us, were the ones who were going to change the world. In the light of other people’s suffering our own seems so petty and small and pointless. In London we got angry about library closures and low pay rises. In London we protested against health cuts and housing benefits – but here in the wind and blood it is easy to see what is important and how, even in our worst moments, our lives are a million times better than these people’s. They would swap with us in a heartbeat.

I left Nigel in that village last night. He’ll wake up, shrug, catch tomorrow’s bus and be in town by nightfall where he can go back to his act and tell his stories and drink his beer and feel good about himself.

Without him I feel free. Without him I feel new and unknown to myself. A mystery slowly unravelling after so many years of blindness. I talk to people in the villages, people on the highway, people out in the stony fields. They all tell the same story. They keep mentioning the compound in the hills. Their faces shade and they look behind them as they say this. A place where gunfire is regularly heard, and chanting, and the cries of strange animals. They moan about the mine diverting their water for its machines, the constant blasting of the dynamite, the last fish seen in the river several months ago. They talk of doing something. Of getting back at the bosses. But you can see in their sunken eyes and defeated mouths that there is nothing left in them but talk.

I collect rumours, stories, and outrageous fabrications from each village I stop at.
Are the men from the compound responsible for this? Are they soldiers?
I ask them, but they pretend not to understand or not to hear or not to care. But I knew I was getting close to the compound when people became less willing to talk, when doors got slammed in my face or the ground in front of me flecked by spittle. They say it lies on a hill. A gated fortress. A palace. A monastery. A torture centre. Take your pick. The stories varied but the fear and apprehension didn’t.

A young man in a bar made of aluminium siding and old beer cans told me where it was. He was slow and hunchbacked and seemed to be retreating into himself even as we spoke. Around us farmers stared into their drinks, flies buzzed, the world went on. I paid him his price and wrote down the directions he gave me.

I can see it long before I reach it. Twenty-foot walls surround the building and stand stark and ugly against blue sky and silver peaks. The trail is well used and it doesn’t take me long to make my way up the hill, through a pass in the mountain and onto the headland.

Two armed guards track me from their watchtowers. They swivel their mounted guns lazily and follow my progress up the hill. I can feel my heart beat, my skin itch, but I put one foot in front of the other because there is nothing else I can do.

The soldiers are no longer slouching against their guns. They are up and jabbering into walkie-talkies and sighting down their barrels at me. I keep walking and taking deep breaths, trying not to stumble on legs that feel as though they’re made of rubber.

I hear the squawk and crackle of their radios, the eerie howling of the wind as it skips through the trees, and then a great wrenching as the main gate to the compound swings open.

I stand, ten feet from the entrance, and wait. The soldiers are right above me, their guns pointing down at my head, but I ignore them and keep my eyes fixed ahead.

I expect more soldiers. More guards. But there is only an old man with a straggly white beard, a priest’s collar, and a mischievous smile on his face. He holds his hands out and says in English, ‘Welcome, my dear. My name is Father McCarthy and I’m so glad you found us.’