The Bone Clocks (34 page)

“She was talking to Audrey the vicar …” Amanda scoots off.

The photographer straightens up, his smile drooping. I tell my sort-of sister-in-law, “Beautiful ceremony, Sharon.”

“Cheers, Ed.” Sharon smiles. “Lucky with the weather, too.”

“Blue skies and sunshine all the way from here on in.”

I shake Peter’s hand. “So, Pete, how does it feel to be Mr. Sykes?”

Peter Webber smiles at what he imagines is my mistake. “Er, you mean Mr. Webber, Ed. Sharon’s now Mrs. Webber.”

My expression should tell him,
You just married a Sykes, matey
, but he’s too in love to read it. He’ll learn. Just like I did.

Holly’s acting like I’m not there. Getting some practice in.

“Ancient lady coming through, make way, make way,” says Great-aunt Eilísh, in her freewheeling Cork accent, escorted by Amanda. “Audrey—the vicar—is off to Tanzania next week and she was asking for a few pointers. Kath, might I just slip in here …” So I step forward and find myself next to Holly after all, wishing I could just slip my hand into hers without it being such a big bloody deal. But it is. I don’t.

“All present and correct,” Pauline Webber tells the photographer. “At last.”

A lithe roller-blader glides past the church. He looks so free.

“Hokey-dokey,” says the photographer, “on the count of three I’d like a big cheesey ‘Cheeeeeeeeese!’ Yes? A-one, a-two, and …”

T
HROUGH A HOLE
blasted in a dry block wall, Aziz snapped a family hurrying across the wasteland north of the doctors’ compound. An Arabic
Grapes of Wrath
, on foot. I told him it could be a cover
shot, if it came out well. “I bring to your hotel tomorrow, after I develop. If on cover,” Aziz rubbed his thumb against his first two fingers in the universal symbol, “Miss Olive, she pay more?”

“
If
it’s used, yeah,” I said. “But you ought to—”

A helicopter hammered by very low, blasting up sand and grit, and Aziz and I both ducked. A Cobra gunship? Kids appeared in the road from the next-door compound, shouting and pointing in the ballooning clouds, and watched it disappear. One boy threw a symbolic stone after it. A woman in hijab anxiously called the children in, shot us a hostile glance, and shut the gate. We were about as close as it was possible to get to Fallujah, a golf shot shy of the “Cloverleaf” intersection, where the Abu Ghraib highway knots into Highway 10. South, through the baked and wavery air, was the bad-tempered holding pen of vehicles, pooling at the verges of the outer checkpoint. Large numbers of marines and a couple of Bradleys—mini-tanks, basically—blocked the road. The second checkpoint was just beyond the Cloverleaf, flanked by a bulldozed-up berm, a ridge of dirt and rubble topped with razor wire. Nobody was allowed into Fallujah today, and only women and children were allowed out.

The rumors about this makeshift clinic for refugees set up by a couple of Iraqi doctors turned out to be true. Nasser was inside recording interviews, thanks to his Al Jazeera press accreditation, which was every bit as authentic as my Bosnian passport. Aziz and I had joined him for a while; at least a hundred patients were being attended to by two doctors and two nurses with little more in the way of equipment than donated first aid boxes. “Beds” were blankets on the floor of what had been a spacious living room, and the main operating table had until recently been a pool table. There was no anesthetic. Most patients were in various degrees of pain, a few in agony, and some dying. The mortuary was an inner room, where six unclaimed bodies lay. The flies and the smell were intolerable; some guys were digging graves in the garden. The nurses promised to distribute the infant formula, but the doctors asked us for painkillers and bandages.

Aziz took a few photographs while Nasser conducted interviews. I’d been introduced as Nasser’s Bosnian cousin, also working for Al Jazeera, but anti-foreign sentiment was acute so Aziz and I soon left to wait by the car and let Nasser work unimpeded. We sat on a broken curb and each drank a bottle of water. Even in spring Mesopotamia is so hot you can drink all day and never need to piss. From Fallujah, just a kilometer to the west, we heard gunfire and, every few minutes, big explosions. The air tasted of burning tires.

Aziz stowed his camera in the car. He returned with cigarettes and offered me one, but I was still on the wagon. “Bush, I understand,” said Aziz, as he lit his. “Bush father, he hate Saddam, then Twin Towers, so Bush want revenge. America need many oil, Iraq has oil, so Bush get oil. Friends of Bush get money also, Halliburton, supply, guns, much money. Bad reason, but I understand. But why your country, Ed? What Britain want here? Britain spend many many dollars here, Britain lose hundreds men here—for why, Ed? I not understand. Long ago people say, ‘Britain good, Britain gentleman.’ Now people say, ‘Britain is whore of America.’ Why? I want understand.”

I sifted through possible answers for Aziz. Did Tony Blair really believe that Saddam Hussein possessed missiles capable of destroying London in forty-five minutes? Did he really believe in the Neocon fantasia about planting a liberal democracy in the Middle East and watching it spread? I could only shrug. “Who knows?”

“Allah know,” said Aziz. “Blair know. Blair wife know.”

I’d give a year of my life to see inside the prime minister’s head. Three, maybe. He’s an intelligent man. You can tell by his gymnastic evasions in interviews. Does he not think, when he’s looking at himself in the mirror,
Oh, fuck, Tony, Iraq has gone well and truly tits-up—why oh why oh
why
did you ever listen to George?

A drone circled above us. It would be armed. I thought of its operator, picturing a crewcut nineteen-year-old called Ryan at a base in Dallas, sucking an ice-cold Frappuccino through a straw. He could open fire on the clinic, kill everyone in and near it, and never smell the cooked meat. To Ryan, we’d be pixellated thermal images
on a screen, writhing about a bit, turning from yellow to red to blue.

The drone flew off, and a white pickup truck hurtled up the dirt-track from the checkpoint area. It skidded to a halt by the clinic gate and the driver—head wrapped in a bloodstained kaffiyeh—jumped out and ran around to the passenger door. Aziz and I walked over to help. The driver, a guy about my age, pulled out a bundle wrapped in a sheet. He tried to carry it but he tripped over a cinder block, cushioning the bundle against his body as he fell. As we helped him up I saw he was holding a boy. The kid was unconscious, a sickly color, only five or six, and had blood oozing from his mouth. The man fired out a frantic volley of Arabic—I only knew the word for “doctor”—and Aziz led him into the clinic compound. I followed. Inside what had been a reception room a woman felt for a pulse on the boy’s arm, said nothing, and called to one of the doctors, who shouted something back from the far corner. As my eyes adjusted to the shade inside the house I saw Nasser speaking with a hollow-faced old guy in a wife-beater’s vest, fanning himself. Then a soft-spoken man, who, even here, smelt of aftershave, was in my face, asking a complex question in dialect—or a question that turned into a threat—containing the words “Bosnia,” “America,” and “kill.” He finished by slashing his throat with his finger. I half nodded, half shook my head, hoping to imply that I’d understood but things were too complicated for me to give him a straightforward answer. Then I walked off. Foolishly, I looked back; the guy was still watching. Aziz followed me out, and around to the Corolla. He told me, “He militia. He test you.”

“Did I pass the test?”

Aziz didn’t answer. “I bring Nasser. If man come, hide. If men with guns come … Goodbye, Ed.” Aziz hurried back to the compound. The open landscape was wasteland, pretty much devoid of cover. Unlike my previous brush with capture outside the mosque, I had time to think. I thought of Aoife in Mrs. Vaz’s classroom at her Stoke Newington primary school, singing “Over the Rainbow.” I
thought of Holly at the homeless shelter off Trafalgar Square, helping some runaway kid make sense of a social-security form.

But the figure who stepped out of the compound, maybe twenty paces away, was neither Aziz nor Nasser nor an AK47-wielding Islamist. It was the driver of the pickup truck, the father of the boy. He stared past his car, towards Fallujah, where helicopters
thucker-thucker-thucker
ed over a quarter of a million humans.

Then he collapsed and sobbed in the dirt.

“C
OP A LOAD
o’ this!” Dave Sykes comes into the Gents at the Maritime Hotel as I’m washing my hands, thinking how precious water is in Iraq. The lounge band in the banquet hall are doing a jazzy rendition of Chris de Burgh’s “Lady in Red.” Dave gazes around the echoey space. “You could fit a crazy-golf course in here.”

“Classy, as well,” I say. “Those tiles are real marble.”

“A classy khazi for the perfect Mafia hit. You could have five machine-gunners leaping out of the cubicles.”

“Though maybe not on your daughter’s wedding day.”

“Nah, maybe not.” Dave walks over to the urinal and unzips his fly. “Remember the bogs in the Captain Marlow?”

“Fondly. That sounds weird. I remember the graffiti. Not that I ever contributed, of course.”

“The smuttiest graffiti in Gravesend, we had at the Captain Marlow. Kath used to make me paint over it, but a fortnight later it’d be back.”

The journo within asks, “Do you miss life as a landlord?”

“Bits and pieces, sure. The
craic
. Some of the regulars. Can’t say I miss the hours, or the fights. Or the taxes and the paperwork. But the old place was home for forty years, so it’d be strange if I didn’t, y’know, have memories wrapped up in it. The kids grew up there. I can’t go back. I couldn’t bear to see it. ‘The Purple Turtle,’ f’Chrissakes! Yuppies on their poserphones. Upstairs all converted into ‘executive apartments.’ Do you go back to Gravesend ever?”

“Not since Mum died, no. Not once.”

Dave zips up his trousers and walks over, placing one foot in front of the other, like an old man who could do with losing a few pounds. At the sink, he tentatively reaches out for the soap dispenser; a frothy blob blooms and drops onto his hand. “Look at that! Life’s more science-fictiony by the day. It’s not just that you get old and your kids leave; it’s that the world zooms away and leaves you hankering for whatever decade you felt most comfy in.” Dave holds his soapy hands under the warm tap and out spurts the water. “Enjoy Aoife while you can, Ed. One moment you’re carrying this lovable little tyke on your shoulders, the next she’s off, and you realize what you suspected all along: However much you love them, your own children are only ever on loan.”

“What I’m dreading is Aoife’s first boyfriend,” I say.

Dave shakes the water from his hands. “Oh, you’ll be fine.”

Me and my big mouth might’ve just reminded Dave of Vinny Costello and the prelude to Jacko’s disappearance, so I grope for a topic changer: “Pete seems like a decent enough bloke, anyway.”

“Reckon so. Mind you, Sharon always was choosy.”

I find myself searching Dave’s reflection in the mirror for any signs of an unspoken “unlike Holly,” but he’s on to me: “Don’t worry Ed, you’ll do. You’re one of the very few other blokes I’ve ever met who can really carry off a beard as well as I can.”

“Thanks.” I hold my hands under the dryer and wonder,
Would I actually do it? Leave Holly and Aoife for the sake of my job?

I’m angry that Holly’s forcing me to choose.

All I want is for Holly to share me with my job.

Like I share Holly with her job. It seems fair.

“It’ll come as a bit of a jolt, I guess,” says Dave, the intuitive ex-pub landlord, “being back in England full-time, like. Will it?”

“Um … yeah, it will, all things being equal.”

“Ah. So all things might not be equal?”

“
Spyglass
offered me an extension to December.”

Dave exhales through his teeth in sympathy.

“Age-old dilemma. Duty versus family. Can’t advise you, Ed, but
for what it’s worth, I’ve met a fair few fellers down the years just after they’ve been told by a doctor that they’re going to die. Stands to reason—if a quack ever tells me I’ve only got X weeks to live, I’ll need a bar, a sympathetic ear, and a stiff drink, too. You won’t be surprised when I tell you that not a one of them fellers ever said, ‘Dave, if only I’d spent more time at work.’ ”

“Maybe they were doing the wrong jobs,” I say, and regret straight away how flippant it sounds. Worse, I don’t get the chance to clarify what I meant because the door flies open and a trio of Holly’s Irish cousins burst in, laughing at a lost punch line: “Ed, Uncle Dave, here you are,” says Oisín, whose blood relationship to Holly I can never get my head around. “Aunt Kath dispatched us to hunt you both down and bring you back alive.”

“Blimey O’Riley, what’ve I done now?”

“Chil
lax
, Uncle Dave. Time to cut the cake, is all.”

A
ZIZ DROVE US
back towards Baghdad so Nasser could tell me about the patients he’d interviewed at the clinic. With Aziz’s photos, we had the bones of a good
Spyglass
story. Before we reached Abu Ghraib, however, we hit a long tailback. Nasser hopped out at a roadside stall and returned with kebabs and two items of news: A fuel convoy had been attacked earlier and the main road back to Baghdad was part blocked by a thirty-foot crater, hence the holdup; and that an American helicopter had been brought down on farmland southeast of the prison complex. We decided to make a detour in search of the crash site. We chewed the chunks of stringy lamb—or possibly goat—and Aziz turned south at the mosque where we’d run into trouble earlier. Once the prison complex was behind us, we saw a reedy column of black smoke rising from behind a windbreak of tamarisk trees. A boy on a bicycle confirmed that, yes, the American helicopter, a Kiowa, had been brought down over there, Allah be praised. Boys growing up in occupied Iraq know about weaponry and military hardware just as I knew about fishing gear, motorbikes, and the Top 40 in the 1980s. The boy mimed a
boom!
and
laughed. Some marines had removed the two dead Americans thirty minutes ago, he told Nasser, so now it was safe to go and see.