Keys of Babylon (26 page)

August 13, 5 a.m. Hackney, London

He awoke. For some reason he had been dreaming of the bushes, the piss-smelling bushes near Skanderbeg Square. People camped there, hung their wet clothes on the branches, shat right outside their bivouacs. Because there was nowhere else.

Once Mic and one of the men on the demolition crew had been drinking arak. It wasn't Mic's idea, he normally hated the stuff. Homemade arak could blind you. But something bad had happened, the boss had shouted and sworn, and his friend had led the way to an underground bar near the Hotel Tirana, a cellar with a few tables and dirty glasses. How they had cursed fate, cursed bosses. There was cement dust on Mic's hands and the seams of his clothes. This had been one of his worst jobs.

Mic had woken up in the bushes, not knowing where he was. And tonight he had been dreaming, dreaming again of Skanderbeg, its statues and invisible beggars, the bushes where the lost people lived.

God, thought Mic. His mouth tasted of arak. He had been dreaming about sleeping and waking and now he had woken up. There was a pain in his head. Which was the pain of the dream. And a noise somewhere. Which was not part of the dream. It was the hostel noise. But a different noise.

In the hostel dormitory there was always someone getting up, coming back, snoring, weeping.

Once Mic had tried to read by the light of a tea candle, but the protests were too much. He thought of a torch under the sheet but had no torch.

And it was hot. It was London hot, the air unmoving in the room, the windows painted shut. The heat was coming out of the walls, out of the London clay. For two days there had been thunder from a white sky. But no rain. ‘Close' was the word the English people used. ‘Bloody close,' they cursed, as they trudged through the suffocating streets, disappeared into holes in the ground.

The hostel windows were illegal but no one would care. The hostel was temporary. It had been temporary ever since it became a hostel. What had it been? Some kind of school. The men slept in one of the classrooms, women and children in another. In Mic's room there was a blackboard still on the wall, words written upon it they didn't teach in school. But you learned them there anyway.

One of the Roma had brought in chalks and had drawn a woman, a white and yellow woman, voluptuous and cruel, a woman with a mane of yellow hair, belisha breasts, a swollen vermilion vulva like the London Underground sign. The sign said
Mind the Gap
.

This woman leered above Mic's bed which was pushed against the wall. Mic hated the drawing but dared not rub it off. The woman was holding the Union Jack, flying it above her head. Beside her was a man, a huge man who also brandished the flag, a giant warrior who served the woman, a giant who held a gun, his cock a gun barrel too, his body tattooed with English words. Love and hate. That's what his body announced. Love and hate.

Mic looked up at the pair in the gloom. Soon it would be dawn. He needed to piss but couldn't make the effort to get up, go out of the room, go down the corridor to the boys' toilet, the urinals with their green beards, the cubicles with smashed doors and more drawings, more love, more hate, other monstrous women, other warriors with guns and missiles and swollen cocks.

When Li failed to turn up at St Pancras he had waited for two hours, abandoning the Champagne Bar to lean against a pillar outside, watching the entrance. By midday, he knew she wasn't coming. So he decided.

Mic walked to where Li lived, a terrace off Junction Road in Archway. Of course, he knew the way. Often he had stood in Bickerton Road and watched her door, the men entering, emerging, the English men, the Nigerians, the little Chinese workmen, neat as shuttlecocks. They came from the supermarkets and the restaurants and the laundries, these Chinese men, some in uniforms the colour of garlic skin. But Mic had never approached the door.

That day he knocked and was admitted.

Li, he said, showing his money, showing all his money. For Li.

The Chinese man in his Spurs tracksuit, his dark glasses, had laughed.

No Li, he said. New girls now.

And Mic had pushed the bankroll at him and said, No, Li. Li. Then the Chinese man had pushed him back, one hand against Mic's green Neil Young tee shirt, and said new girls now, and Mic had pushed and pushed and then given up. As he knew he would give up, Mic on his heels as the man pushed him out, as he knew the man would, Mic crushing the money back into his own pocket, as he knew he must. And there was Mic standing outside the slammed door, Stanis beside him, hand on Mic's shoulder.

See, said Stanis.

They went home and on the way bought six litres of White Lightning at Costcutter. Then Mic gave Stanis some money and he came back with amphetamines. Stanis had already lost his job. Three days later Mic had not been into work and Greendown told him he was finished.

Mic considered this. It meant no autumn in Hyde Park, no vacuuming up the plane leaves, no watching the lovers unpacking their picnics, or the girls in their school blazers and chicory-blue check dresses. How Mic had loved to watch those girls, those honey-coloured foals, school socks white fetlocks, the joy in them, the black mercury of their limbs as they raced over the grass.

Yes, how he loved the park and its people. He would go back and speak to Obi Wan and Obi Two. They weren't so bad. They knew he was a good worker. One mistake, that's all it was. One black mark on Mic's record.

His head still ached from the dream. But what had that noise been? And where was he now? On a bench in Hyde Park, smelling the cut grass? Under the Skanderbeg bushes, waking up with the arak ache, some angel pissing a golden shaft out of the sun?

It had sounded like breaking glass. Glass breaking as dawn broke. A man asleep on the floor beside him suddenly rose up. The sheet fell away and he stood naked, head to one side, listening. He was a black man, cock quivering. Eyes white.

There were other noises, and voices in the corridor. Then a woman's shriek, far away. Then an explosion.

All the men had woken now. The Roma artist was squashing clothes into a plastic bag, one of the Bulgarians shaking himself like a wet dog. Mic sat up. Mic the dreamer, Mic always the last, Mic who might have married Flutura if she had stayed, Mic who saw his mother folding the dollar bill into that tiny parcel.

It occurred to Mic he was going to die. How strange, he thought. To die in London. The idea made him smile. He saw his mother again. Every spring she had taken him to a wet meadow and told him to pick sprigs of horsemint. Then she wrapped them in damp newspaper and they carried them back to town and sold them in a market. And Mic, still in bed in the dormitory, realised that it was only women who had bought the mint. Never the men. Mic would sit on the street, his fingers smelling of the herb, his hands smudged with wet newsprint. No, never the men. But Mic would have bought the mint. Of course he would. Mic would have given a mint posy to Li, bought her a mojito, minty in a frosted glass.

Now language boiled. The hostel languages, angry and incomprehensible, were tearing at the windows and doors. Someone had called this place
the spike
, this place where people arrived who could not move forward, could not go back. They were speared by that spike. And the languages were melting. They were all melting into one language, and how quickly that language became one word only.

Fire
, said all the different words for fire.
Fire
, shouted the Roma artist.
Fire
, whispered the Bulgarian, the Bulgarian who never spoke.

Fire
, breathed Mic to himself, Mic who could smell varnish burning, Mic who breathed in smoke, a smoke worse than arak or the bushes where the searchlights never shone, Mic who stood swaying on his own bed, a scrum of men trying to open the dormitory door, the sealed windows breaking, the woman on the blackboard smiling her invitation and waving the Union Jack, the giant beside her strafing the room with the flame-thrower between his legs.

August 13, 4 p.m. Old Mint Street, Valletta, Malta

If you look at the map I'm already halfway there. Halfway to where I want to be.

Where I want to be is a lecture theatre with maybe five hundred seats. Expectant atmosphere. And within it is a huge sexy hush.

The screen's already up, the equipment tested. We're ready to roll. My translator is brilliant yet not ostentatious. She is certainly striking, with pale skin and spidery eyelashes. Another one, I'd say, with Iranian blood. Yes, Shiraz and its shining shrines.

What follows is a small delay. We're thirteen minutes late. And then there I am, walking into the auditorium. A good linen suit and appropriate stubble. And, inevitably, granted the publicity, there is applause. Timid at first, then echoing all around, the clapping, the voices of greeting and welcome, the lecture room alive. And the people are standing. Yes, they are standing to welcome me back. After all this time, after the travails of this country and all my foreign travels, it feels as if I'm coming home.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I say. In Arabic, of course. My translator is smiling. She opens her hands as if to say she has nothing to do. And the audience is gazing down, young women rapt, young men tensed, a phalanx of academics who have brought their best students.

Even now the hall is darkening, the DVD starting. And my film is commencing. There on screen is one searing image. The star-shaped entry point of the first Tomahawk missile in the ferro-concrete of the Amiriya shelter in Baghdad.

That star is the most astounding thing I have ever seen. And yes, you know I have seen astounding things. You must know that by now.

Film there, Nazaar, I said to the cameraman, all those years ago. And I'll remember that direction all my life.

Nazaar, there. There.

I watched Nazaar turn and direct the Sony, watched him flex that steady hand and arm, saw the camera's green light come on, a cat's eye in the murk where we crouched with the scorched and the scarified and the dead.

Umm Ghada herself was just off camera, an inch out of shot. Umm Ghada, in her black, the guardian of Amiriya, was nodding her head at the Sony's faint whir.

Dragonfly wings, I had always thought that Sony sound. A child's breathing. Lost now, that camera. With so much else.

Christ. How long has that image been hidden from the world? Hidden in its film cartridge, hidden in that brown sports bag filled with film cartridges? Then hidden in a drawer, a car boot, hidden in an attic? For so long hidden, the great image that will help the world understand itself. That image is a poem that pulverised concrete, a maqam of Baghdad daylight streaming in to make a pool on the shelter's cement floor. A terrible spotlight.

Yes, that's how my film starts. My film at last re-edited, restored. My masterpiece alive, its fifty-five minutes and thirteen seconds reborn from all the hours of tape, from all those boxes and bags.

And the film ends as it begins. With that ragged white star. With the audience looking out of the Amiriya darkness into the irreproachable day. Just as I did. As Nazaar did. As Umm Ghada did. The three of us gazing from the charnel house into a new morning in Baghdad.

Genius I think, though I say it myself. That image. That edit. As if we are all in the shelter. As if the shelter is the world. The shelter that did not shelter the children that earlier morning as the Tomahawk came down, its nose cone chequered like a clown's trousers.

Yes. I'm halfway there. That lecture theatre is in the National Museum of Iraq. After the screening, the Foreign Minister presents me with the medal. Men shake my hand. Women blush as they come forward. And yes, here is Nazaar. Nazaar is alive after all this time. Yes, here is the real hero. And I hold his arm aloft and the audience salutes the man who cared for the camera as he did his children. But of Umm Ghada there will be no trace.

Yes, that is how it will be in the museum. Next year or the year after. But one day soon.

Melitta is on her roof again. I can see her there from my window. I have the top apartment, Number Five. She is Number Three. Such a colour she is, there on her rug. Milky coffee, I think. And a constellation of moles on her right shoulder. There she drowses with her cup of mint tea and her John Grisham. Perhaps she does not realise I overlook her roof. Perhaps she does. My window is narrow, with a wire gauze nailed over the outside. Perhaps she thinks I cannot see. Perhaps she thinks I can. But there she lies. Naked, oiled. Her hair a cable. Her arse a black crucifix.

Hello, Max, she will say on the stairs, looking at my red hair.

Hello Melitta, I will say.

How is Triq Zekka treating you? she will ask.

It's wonderful, I will say.

And your work?

It goes well, I always smile. Very well.

I'm glad, she will say as she unlatches the door with its iron bolts and she steps into the white light of the morning, or the unearthly mauve of an evening thunderstorm here on the island of lightning.

Triq Zekka is Old Mint Street. I've been here a month. Cheap because the ablutions are not what they might be. Because cockroaches wave their arms from behind the plaster, the plaster that falls and lies white in the webs, grey in my hair.