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-thuckered over a quarter of a million humans.
Then he collapsed and sobbed in the dirt.
“COP 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?”
“Chillax, Uncle Dave. Time to cut the cake, is all.”
AZIZ 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.
A track led over an irrigation canal, through the tamarisks and into a field of weeds. The smoldering carcass of the crushed and blackened Kiowa lay on its side, with its tail section lying half the field away. “Ground-to-air missile,” speculated Nasser, “cut in middle. Like sword.” Maybe twenty men and boys were standing around. Farm buildings stood on the far side, and machinery lay neglected. Aziz parked in the corner and we got out and walked over. The late afternoon was filled with insect noises. Aziz took pictures as we approached. I thought of the pilots, and wondered what had spun through their heads as they careered to Earth. An old man in a red kaffiyeh asked Nasser if we were with a newspaper, and Nasser said, Yes, we worked for a Jordanian one. We were here to counter the lies of the Americans and their allies, Nasser said, and asked the man if he had seen the helicopter crash. The old man said, No, he knew nothing, he only heard an explosion. Some other men, maybe the Mahdi Army, drove off, but he had been too far away, and look — he pointed to his eyes — his cataracts were clouding over.
Seeing too much in Iraq can get you killed.