The Bone Clocks (33 page)

I said, “It’s not your dad, it’s me, Ed.”

Holly said: “I know, you idiot. I’m pregnant.”

I thought,
I’m not ready for this
, and said, “That’s fantastic.”

“On marriage,” continues the Reverend Audrey Withers, “Jesus made only one direct remark: ‘What God has joined, let no man strike asunder.’ Theologians have debated what this means down the ages, but it profits us to consider Jesus’s actions as well as his words. Many of us know the story of the wedding at Cana, as it’s trotted out at most Christian wedding sermons you’ll ever hear, this one included. The banquet at Cana was down to its last drop of wine, so Mary asked Jesus to save the day and not even the Son of God could refuse a determined mother, so he told the servants to fill the wine jars with water. When the servants poured the jars, out came wine—and not your mediocre plonk, either. This was vintage. The master of the banquet told the bridegroom, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first, and then the cheaper stuff after the guests are legless, but you have saved the best until last.” How human of the Son of God—to make his debut as a miracle worker, not as raiser of the dead, a healer of leprosy, or a walker on the water, but as a good son and loyal friend.” The Reverend Audrey gazes over our heads, as if watching a home video of Cana. “I believe that
if
God cared what size and shape and form human marriage should take, He would have given us clear instructions, via the Gospels. I
believe, therefore, that God is willing to trust us with the small print.”

Brendan’s next to me. His phone, set to silent, buzzes. His hand goes to his jacket, but a glare from Kath in front aborts the mission.

“Sharon and Peter,” the vicar carries on, “have written their own wedding vows. I am a big fan of self-penned vows. To get the job done, they had to sit down, talk, and listen, both to what
was
said aloud and to what
wasn’t
, which is where the real truth so often hides. They had to compromise—a holy word, that, as well as a practical art. Now, a vicar isn’t a fortune-teller,” I see Aoife prick up her ears, “so I can’t tell Sharon and Peter what awaits them in the years ahead, but marriage can, should, and must evolve. Don’t be alarmed, and don’t resent it. Be patient and kind, unflaggingly. In the long run, it’s the unasked-for hot-water bottles on winter nights that matter more than the extravagant gestures. Express gratitude, especially for work that tends to get taken for granted. Identify problems as they arise, remembering that anger is flammable. When you’ve behaved like a donkey, Peter,” the groom smiles at his toes, “remember that a sincere apology never diminishes the apologizer. Wrong turns teach us the right way.”

What grade, I wonder, would me and Holly get, on the relationship scorecard of the Reverend Audrey Withers? C+? D–?

“When’s the bit where Uncle Peter
kisses
her?” asks a kid.

The congregation laughs. “Great idea.” The Reverend Audrey Withers looks like a woman who enjoys her job. “Why not just skip to the good bit?”

N
ASSER DROVE THE
half-Corolla half–Fiat 5. Aziz occupied the passenger seat with his camera under a blanket at his feet, and I sat in the back behind a screen of dry cleaning, ready to burrow into the footwell under sheets and boxes of infant formula. Baghdad’s low-rise western suburbs stretched out along the four-lane highway to Fallujah. After a mile or two the apartment blocks gave way to
middle-class streets from the money-slick 1970s: whitewashed, flat-roofed houses surrounded by high walls and steel gates. Then we passed a few miles of two-story cinder-block buildings, with shops or workshops below and meager living quarters above. These acquired the visual repetition of a cheap cartoon. We passed several petrol stations, whose queues went on for many hundreds of vehicles. The drivers would be waiting there all day. Even in April, the sun was more of a glaring sky zone than the bright disk of northern latitudes. Unemployed men of all ages stood around in dishdashas, smoking and talking. Women in hijabs or full-length burkas walked in small groups, carrying plastic bags of vegetables: It struck me that Iraq was looking more Iranian by the week. Kids Aoife’s age played at Insurgents Versus Americans. Nasser fed a cassette into the player, and Arabic music blammed out through the tinny speakers. A woman sang scales I’m not hardwired for, and the song must have been a classic because both Nasser and Aziz got to work on the backing vocals. During an instrumental break, I asked Nasser—half shouting above the din of the car and the music—what the song was about. “A girl,” my fixer half-shouted back. “Man she love go to Iran to fight the war, but he never come back. She
very
beautiful, so other men say, ‘Hey, honey, I got money, I got big house, I got
wasta
, you marry me?’ But the girl she say, ‘No, I wait one thousand years for my soldier.’ Sure, this song is very … How you say?—like sugar too much? I forget word—santi-mantle?”

“Sentimental.”

“
Veeery
sentimental, and my wife say, the girl of this song, she is crazy! If she don’t marry, what happen to her? Dead soldiers can’t send money! She gonna starve! Only a man write so stupid song, my wife say. But I say, ‘Ah …’ ” Nasser made a dismissive motion with his hand. “This song touch me.” He thumped his chest. “Love is more strong than the death.” He turned around. “You know?”

I
VANO DEL
P
IO
at the
Sydney Morning Herald
had recommended Nasser as a fixer when he left Baghdad, and he was one of the best
I’ve ever employed. Preinvasion, Nasser had worked in broadcasting and had reached management level, which meant he’d had to join the Ba’ath Party. He had a decent house and could support his wife and three children, even in a society starved by U.S. and UN sanctions. Postinvasion, Nasser scraped a living from working for foreign press. Under Saddam’s regime the official fixers were a shifty crew, paid to feed you Saddam’s line and inform the Mukhabarat about any ordinary Iraqis foolish enough to try to tell you anything true about life under the dictator. Nasser, however, had a journalist’s nose and eye, and on some of my best stories for
Spyglass
I insisted he received credit and pay as co-writer. He never used his real name, however, in case an enemy denounced him to any of a dozen insurgency groups as a collaborator. Aziz the photographer was an ex-colleague of Nasser’s, but his English was as limited as my Arabic so I didn’t know him as closely as I did my fixer. He knew his trade, though, and was cautious, crafty, and brave in pursuit of a good shot. Photography is a dangerous hobby in Iraq; the police assume that you’re recceing for a suicide mission.

We passed crumbling walls and decrepit shops.

“You break it,” Colin Powell had warned Bush, in what’s become known as the Pottery Barn Anecdote, “you’ll own it …”

Bedraggled families sifted giant tumuli of rubbish.

“You’ll be the proud owner of twenty-five million people …”

Lines of streetlamps, most leaning over, some fallen.

“All their hopes, aspirations, problems. You’ll own it all.”

We passed a buckled crash barrier by a small crater: the site of an IED attack. We hit an official checkpoint manned by the Iraqi police that cost us forty minutes. Official police shouldn’t hassle a foreign journalist but we were all relieved that they didn’t seem to notice my foreignness. Nasser’s car is in a bad way even by Iraqi standards, but its shiteness acts as professional camouflage. What self-respecting journo, agent, or jihadist would travel in such a pile of crap?

The further west we drove, the riskier our venture became. Nasser’s local knowledge grew scantier, and both the Abu Ghraib Highway
and the N10 would be littered with dozens of roadside IEDs. The obvious targets for these were the U.S. military convoys, but knowing that any dead dog or cardboard box or bin-bag of crap might conceal enough explosives to roast a Humvee put you on permanent edge. Then there was the danger of kidnapping. My darkish complexion, beard, brown eyes, and local attire let me pass as a pale Iraqi at first glance, but my basic Arabic betrays me as a foreigner within a few words. I had my fake Bosnian passport to explain my poor language skills while claiming a Muslim affinity, but subterfuge is a high-risk game, and if a mob could be calmly reasoned with, it wouldn’t be a mob. Bosnians aren’t obvious kidnappees for ransom bounty, but neither were Japanese NGO workers until a fortnight ago. If my press pass was found, my value would go up; I’d be sold as a spy to an Al Qaeda affiliate, and they’re less interested in money than in a recorded “confession” and a beheading for the webcam. Midway between Baghdad and Fallujah we reached the town of Abu Ghraib, famous for decaying factories, palm dates, and a vast prison complex where Saddam’s enemies, or potential enemies, used to be tortured in submedieval conditions. Big Mac hears rumors that not a lot has changed under the CPA. We passed its high, kilometer-long fortified wall on the left and Nasser translated a slogan daubed on a bombed-out building facing it:
We will knock on the gates of Heaven with American skulls
. That was a killer opening or closing line for an article. I jotted it down in my notebook.

In front of a mosque, Nasser pulled over to give plenty of space to a U.S. convoy joining the highway. Aziz took a few pictures from inside the car, but didn’t dare get out; to a jumpy gunner, a telephoto lens looks like an RPG launcher. I counted twenty-five vehicles in the Fallujah-bound convoy, and wondered if Big Mac was sweating his butt off in any of the Humvees. Then Aziz said something in Arabic and Nasser told me, “Ed, trouble!” Half a dozen men were walking towards us from a row of low buildings alongside the mosque.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Nasser turned the ignition.

Nothing.

Nasser turned the ignition.

Nothing.

Three seconds to decide whether to bluff it, or hide …

I slid down under the milk cartons, a few seconds before a man exchanged greetings with Nasser through the driver’s window. The man asked us where we were going. Nasser said he and his cousin were taking supplies to Fallujah. Then the man asked Nasser, “Are you a Sunni or a Shi’a?”

A dangerous question; preinvasion, I seldom heard it.

Nasser replied, “While Fallujah burns, we are all Iraqis.”

Like I said, Nasser’s good. The voice asked for a cigarette.

After another pause, the man asked what supplies we had.

“Baby milk,” said Aziz. “For the hospitals.” Nasser said how his imam told them the American pigs were throwing baby milk into the sewers, to stop Iraqi babies growing up to become jihadists.

“We have hungry babies here, too,” said the man.

Neither Aziz nor Nasser had an answer to hand.

“I said,” repeated the man, “we have hungry babies too.”

If the car was unloaded, I’d be found, a foreigner, within spitting distance of Iraq’s Ground Zero of Incarceration. By hiding, I’d already put my Bosnian Muslim journalist story beyond use. Nasser sounded cheerful. They’d be happy to donate a box of baby powder to the babies of Abu Ghraib. Then, innocently, he asked for a favor in return. His damn car wouldn’t start, and he needed a push.

I couldn’t catch the man’s reply. When the Corolla’s door opened, I had no way of knowing if Nasser was being ordered out at gunpoint, or if every box of baby formula was about to be removed. The seat was flipped forward and the box covering my face was lifted away …

… I saw a hairy wrist with a Chinese Rolex and the underside of the box covering my face. I waited for a shout. Then the driver’s seat
flopped back, and no more boxes were taken. I heard laughter, then the car sagged under Nasser’s weight and goodbyes called out. Soon after, I felt the car being pushed along, heard the tires crunch gravel, and felt the car jolt before the engine started.

Aziz half gasped: “I thinked we dead men.”

I was lying under the boxes twisted and breathless.

Thinking,
When I get back home, I’ll never leave again
.

Thinking,
When I get back home, I’ll never feel this alive
.

“H
OKEY-DOKEY, WE
’
LL START
with the two families,” says the beagle-faced photographer in his Hawaiian shirt. It’s sunny on the church steps, and all the leaves are fresh and lime-green. They’d be microwaved brown by a single afternoon in Mesopotamia, where flora has to equip itself with armor and thorns to survive. “Webbers on the left,” says the photographer, “and Sykeses on the right, if you will.” Pauline Webber gets her family into position with martial efficiency, while the Sykeses drift into place unhurriedly. Holly looks around for Aoife, who’s scooping up drifts of confetti for a confetti fight. “Picture time, Aoife.” Aoife snuggles against Holly and neither think to look for me. So I stay where I am, out of shot. Like all belongers, the Sykeses and Webbers don’t notice how easily they slip into groups, lines, ranks, gangs. But we nonbelongers know what we are, all right. “
Squeeze
in both ends, if you will,” says the photographer.

“Wakey-wakey, Ed.” Kath Sykes beckons me. “You’re in on this.”

The devil suggests I answer, “Holly seems to disagree,” but I step between Kath and Ruth. Holly, below, doesn’t turn around, but Aoife, with flowers in her hair, looks back and up. “Daddy, did you see me take up the ring tray?”

“I’ve never seen a ring tray held so skillfully, Aoife.”

“
Daddy
, flattery will get you anywhere,” and everyone who hears laughs, so much to Aoife’s delight that she repeats the phrase.

Once I hoped that, by not getting married, me and Holly might avoid the scenes that Mum and Dad played out before Dad got sent
down for his twelve years. True, me and Holly don’t shout and throw stuff, but we sort of do, invisibly.

“Hokey-dokey,” says the photographer. “All aboard?”

“Where’s Great-aunt Eilísh?” asks Amanda, Brendan’s eldest.

“Great
-great
-aunt Eilísh to you, technically,” notes Brendan.

“Right, Dad, whatever.” Amanda’s sixteen.

“We’re on
rather
a tight schedule,” declares Pauline Webber.