Luke’s eyes locked on to the bottles. The light was coming through them and caused a rainbow stripe to appear on the white wall of the fort. The boy Mark tipped the rifle off his shoulder and took aim, the joint dangling from his lips as he crinkled an eye. ‘Die, motherfuckers,’ he said and looked pleased as the water exploded. Scullion enjoyed the boys’ laughter and felt nauseous again at the metallic smell and the echo in the valley. He hoped he’d remembered to put a 355 radio in the car in case he got lost or the convoy moved or something.
‘It’s fucken boiling out here,’ Lennox said, wiping factor thirty on his neck and shoulders.
‘Twos up on that,’ Mark said. Lennox squirted sunblock in his direction and they all laughed.
‘Cumshot,’ said Flannigan.
‘I’m totally wasted,’ Dooley said.
The blue sky above the fort, the blue sky, thought Scullion, throwing a stone down into the gully. ‘Alexander the Great dug wells near the Oxus to get fresh water,’ he said, ‘and the water was bad. You know why? There was thick black liquid seeping into the water.’
‘Black liquid?’ said Flannigan.
‘Oil. The general’s advisers said it was a bad omen. The advisers. They said it warned of troubled times.’
‘Did they get rich?’ Lennox asked.
Scullion ignored him. It was a sign of leadership: knowing exactly when to ignore people and for how long. ‘It’s the first mention of oil in literature,’ he said, and Luke, the younger officer, his former pupil, turned briefly out of interest but let his interest die. Luke lay on his back with a hand over his face, palm open to the sun, and felt sure that whatever happened after the tour he might never again see a day like this. An entire version of himself was moving into the shade and he experienced the mild distaste that comes before a change, the fear of nostalgia.
‘They don’t build them like this any more,’ said Flannigan. He looked at the ruin and spat in the dust.
‘We don’t build anything,’ Scullion said. ‘That’s part of the problem out here. Even the Soviets built apartment blocks. All we do is help bring in metal containers. Drop them from the sky, promise to helicopter them out at the end. Life’s complicated, boys. Look over there: the ancients had windows, ventilation. You won’t see that in a shipping container. We’re all just part of a transit area nowadays.’
A WEDDING FEAST
The elder had a fistful of gambling chits and he squatted down with his brothers to flick quails. They all looked up when the soldiers came into the village in their loud jeeps. Scullion drove to the end of the only road and stopped on a humpback bridge, next to a school where children could be heard chanting in a study circle. The CD stopped when Scullion turned off the engine. He rolled down the window. They could hear the water running. A woman spread a light blue burqa on the grass.
The village was fresh, Luke said later, green like an oasis, and after the hilltop the air seemed soft. Maybe it was the children’s voices and the noise of the quails, a life not to do with heat. Everything in the desert emerges from heat and goes back to heat, but in Bad Kichan there was water and activity and tins with labels on them. ‘Keep your eyes open,’ Scullion said. One of the local men came to the vehicles with his hands up. He spoke rapidly and Dooley released the catch. The major turned to find Rashid. ‘Is he speaking Dari? Tell him to fuck off.’
‘A wedding today,’ Rashid said. ‘The man offers you blessings.’
‘That’s some crazy-ass mumbling,’ Lennox said.
Scullion looked nervous. ‘Tell the old fox to back off. I can speak a little Pashtun if he wants to bless.’
‘He is younger than you,’ said Rashid.
‘I don’t care if he’s sweet sixteen, Rashid. I want him to get the fuck back from this squad. That’s an order.’
‘An order, sir?’
Rashid’s good eye was clear. He was the only one of the group not feeling nervous and his sense of command, his entire presence, had altered when he spoke, and it altered further as he stepped
through and touched the shoulder of the local man. Whatever he said made the man tap his chest and walk down the track to where the villagers had gathered. Rashid turned to the boys and put out his hands and smiled. ‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘This is a feasting day and custom says you must join to celebrate.’
Children followed them and Scullion handed out packs of coloured pencils from his thigh pockets. He laughed as they grabbed them and he gave them sweets when the pencils ran out. He was feeling good because you only get worried when there are no children, when the place is quiet and the people are inside. Luke had the same thought. As they walked up, Scullion could see past rickety doors into the low mud dwellings. One house revealed a huddle of eyes, men sitting on a red carpet, and he stopped at the door to examine them. They were around a television set, watching an old tennis match between Borg and McEnroe.
The street was busy and there was music outside the
hujra
, the guesthouse, where three chickens’ heads lay in a puddle of blood. Rashid handed a case of water to Scullion to give to the elder and as he placed the water at the man’s feet Scullion said, ‘
As-salaam alikum
.’
‘
W-alikum-as-salaam
,’ the man said.
‘
Khair Yosay,
’ Scullion said. The ANA captain turned to Scullion and a smile creased the contours of Rashid’s short, dark beard as he said, ‘Your accent is very strange.’ Luke peered into the pomegranate grove at the side of the guesthouse and saw a group of boys there, all dressed in brown. Some of them touched their breasts as he looked and he did the same. There was a wall around the grove and Luke could see a cart loaded with fruit. Silently, he heard co-ordinates and radio crackle in his head and he imagined an aerial shot of the village. Calm the fuck down, he
told himself. Stay on it. He counted heads. He couldn’t be sure but he thought one of the boys in the grove, the one in the long waistcoat, was holding a mobile phone. Luke tried to work out what was going on and he wanted to be friendly but he hated the phone and how they all stood still.
‘Let’s not hang about here,’ Flannigan said.
‘You’re fine,’ Scullion said. ‘Listen, guys. It’s cool. This is how we bring peace to these people.’
‘What, by barging into a private wedding?’ said Luke.
‘Showing face,’ Scullion said. ‘Taking an interest. A wee bit of civilised banter. A glass of tea.’
Luke saw a heap of cartons against the wall labelled Nestlé Fruita Vitals. ‘We need to get out of here.’
Rashid stood still. Scullion looked again at the leader of the village
shura
and bowed to him and wished he had a cigar he could offer him. Whatever Scullion said, the sweat was pouring off him and his mouth was dry, yet he believed, deep at the centre of all this rising alarm, that something existed in faith or memory that would serve them well. Whatever it was, he believed in the code. He was from County Westmeath and he knew about gangs and he knew about boys who wanted to be the big man. He’d known them for thirty years and they didn’t piss on their own doorstep. He looked over at the soldiers in his party and felt they were each a version of himself. ‘Let’s not insult this gentleman’s hospitality,’ he said.
Mark looked at a low wall where a row of skewered kebabs were cooking on a grill. Beside it, on the dusty ground, were several basins of stew and rice. A bowl of almonds caught his eye as he stood up straight and looked at the sky and thought of a Chinese restaurant back home. He and Lisa Nolan used to go