“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 …”
THROUGH 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.