April 16
“IF YOU’RE ASKING whether I’m a war junkie,” I tell Brendan, “then the answer’s no, I am not.” I sound pissed off. I am, I suppose.
“Not you, Ed!” My virtual brother-in-law disguises his backped-aling behind a Tony Blairish suavity. Brendan looks like, and is, a workaholic property developer in his midforties having a rare weekend off. “We know you aren’t a war junkie. Obviously. I mean, you flew all the way back to England for Sharon’s wedding. No, I was only asking if it ever happens that a war reporter gets sort of hooked on the adrenaline of life in war zones. That’s all.”
“Some do, yes,” I concede, rubbing my eye and thinking of Big Mac. “But I’m not in any danger of that. The symptoms are pretty obvious.” I ask a passing teenage waitress for one more Glenfiddich. She says she’ll bring it right over.
“What are the symptoms?” Sharon’s four years younger than Holly and rounder in the face. “Just out of curiosity.”
I’m feeling cornered, but Holly’s hand finds mine on the bench and squeezes it. “The symptoms of war-zone addiction. Well. The same as the clichés of the foreign correspondent, I guess. Rocky marriages; estrangement from family life; a dissatisfaction with civilian life. Alcohol abuse.”
“Not Glenfiddich, I trust?” Dave Sykes, Holly’s mild-mannered dad, lightens the mood a little.
“Let’s hope not, Dave.” Let’s hope the subject goes away.
“You must see some pretty hard-core, full-on stuff, Ed,” says Pete Webber, accountant, keen cyclist, and tomorrow’s groom. Pete’s bat-eared and his hairline’s beating a hasty retreat, but Sharon’s marrying him for love, not hair follicles. “Sharon was saying you’ve covered Bosnia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Baghdad. Places most people try to get away from.”
“Some journos carve a career in the business pages, others out of the plastic surgery of the stars. I’ve made mine out of war.”
Pete hesitates. “And you’ve never wondered, ‘Why war?’ ”
“Guess I’m immune to the charms of silicone.”
The waitress brings me my Glenfiddich. I look at Pete, Sharon, Brendan and his wife Ruth, Dave, and Kath, Holly’s ever-vigorous Irish mum. They’re still waiting for me to say something profound about my journalistic motives. The Sykeses aren’t without their scars—Holly’s youngest brother, Jacko, went missing in 1984 and his body was never found—but the loss I see, work with, has been on an industrial scale. This makes me different. I doubt this difference is explicable. I doubt even I understand it.
“Do you write to bring the world’s attention to the vulnerable?” asks Pete.
“God no.” I think of Paul White, on my first assignment in Sarajevo, lying dead in a puddle because he wanted to Make a Difference. “The world’s default mode is basic indifference. It’d like to care, but it’s just got too much on at the moment.”
“Then to play the devil’s avocado,” says Brendan, “why risk your neck to write articles that won’t change anything?”
I fabricate a smile for Brendan. “First, I don’t really risk my neck; I’m rigorous about taking precautions. Second, I—”
“What precautions can you take,” Brendan interrupts, “to stop a massive car bomb going off outside your hotel?”
I look at Brendan and blink three times to make him vanish. Damn. Maybe next time. “I’ll be moving into the Green Zone when I go back to Baghdad. Second, if an atrocity isn’t written about, it stops existing when the last witnesses die. That’s what I can’t stand. If a mass shooting, a bomb, a whatever, is written about, then at least it’s made a tiny dent in the world’s memory. Someone, somewhere, some time, has a chance of learning what happened. And, just maybe, acting on it. Or not. But at least it’s there.”
“So you’re a sort of archivist for the future,” says Ruth.
“Sounds pretty good, Ruth. I’ll take that.” I rub my eye.
“Are you going to miss it all,” asks Brendan, “after July?”
“After June,” says Holly, cheerfully.
No one sees me squirm. I hope. “When it happens,” I tell Brendan, “I’ll let you know how I feel.”
“So have you got anything lined up, workwise?” asks Dave.
“Ed’s got a lot of strings to his bow, Dad,” says Holly. “Maybe with the print media, or the BBC, and the Internet’s really shaking up the news world. One of Ed’s ex-editors at the FT is lecturing at UCL, now.”
“Well, I think it’s great you’ll be settling in London for good, Ed,” says Kath. “We do worry, when you’re away. I’ve seen pictures of this Fallujah place—those bodies they strung up on the bridge! Shocking. And baffling. I thought the Americans won, months ago. I thought the Iraqis hated Saddam. I thought he was a monster.”
“Iraq’s a lot more complicated than the Masters of War realized, Kath. Or wanted to realize.”
Dave claps his hands. “Now we’ve got the chitchat out of the way, let’s get down to the serious stuff: Ed, are you joining us on Pete’s stag do tonight? Kath’ll babysit for Aoife, so you’ve got no excuse.”
Pete tells me, “A few mates from work are meeting me at the Cricketers—a lovely pub, just round the corner. Then—”
“I’d rather stay blissfully ignorant about ‘then,’ ” says Sharon.
“Oh, right,” says Brendan, “as if the hens are going to play Scrabble all evening.” In a stage whisper he tells me, “Male strippers at the Brighton Pavilion followed by a crack den at the end of the pier.”
Ruth play-cuffs him: “You slanderer, Brendan Sykes!”
“Too right,” says Holly. “You wouldn’t catch respectable ladies like us going anywhere near a Scrabble board.”
“Remind me what you’re really up to again,” says Dave.
“A sedate wine tasting,” replies Sharon, “with tapas, at a bar owned by one of Pete’s oldest friends.”
“Wine-tasting session,” scoffs Brendan. “Back in Gravesend they call a piss-up a piss-up. So how about it, Ed?”
Holly’s giving me a go-ahead face, but I’d better start proving what a great father I am while Holly’s still talking to me. “No offense, Pete, but I’m going to wuss out. The jet lag’s catching up with me, and it’ll be nice to spend time with Aoife. Even if she will be fast asleep. That way Kath can join the wine-tasting session, too.”
“Oh, I don’t mind babysitting, pet,” says Kath. “I’ve got to watch my blood pressure, anyway.”
“No, really, Kath.” I finish my Scotch, enjoying the blast-off. “You spend as much time as you can with your relatives from Cork—and I’ll grab an early night, otherwise I’ll be one giant yawn-in-a-suit at the church today. I mean tomorrow. God, see what I mean?”
“All right, then,” says Kath. “If you’re really sure …”
“Absolutely sure,” I tell her, rubbing my itchy eye.
“Don’t rub it, Ed,” Holly tells me. “You’ll make it worse.”
ELEVEN O’CLOCK AT night, and all’s well, kind of, for now. Olive Sun wants me flying out again by Thursday at the latest, so I’ll have to tell Holly soon. Tonight, really, so she doesn’t make plans for the three of us next week. Fallujah is the biggest deployment of marines since the battle for Hue City in Vietnam, and I’m stuck here on the Sussex coast. Holly’ll hit the frigging roof, but I’d better get it over and done with, and she’ll have to calm down for Sharon’s wedding tomorrow. Aoife’s asleep in the single bed in the corner of our hotel room. I only got here after her bedtime, so I still haven’t said hi to my daughter, but the First Rule of Parenting states that you never wake a peacefully sleeping child. I wonder how Nasser’s girls are sleeping tonight, with dogs barking and gunfire crackling and marines kicking down doors. CNN’s on the flat-screen TV with the sound down, showing footage of marines under fire on rooftops in Fallujah. I’ve seen it five times or more and even the pundits can’t think of anything fresh to say until the news cycle starts up again in a few hours, when Iraq begins a new day. Holly texted a quarter of an hour ago to say she and the other hens’ll be heading back to the hotel soon. “Soon” could mean anything in the context of a wine bar, though. I switch off the TV, to prove I’m no war junkie, and go to the window. Brighton Pier’s all lit up like Fairyland on Friday night, and pop music booms from the fairground at the far end. By English standards it’s a warm spring evening, and the restaurants and bars on the promenade are at the end of a busy evening. Couples walk hand in hand. Night buses trundle. Traffic obeys the traffic laws, by and large. I don’t knock a peaceful and well-functioning society. I enjoy it, for a few days, weeks, even. But I know that, after a couple of months, a well-ordered life tastes like a flat, nonalcoholic lager. Which isn’t the same as saying I’m addicted to war zones, as Brendan helpfully implied earlier. That’s as ridiculous as accusing David Beckham of being addicted to playing soccer. Just as soccer is Beckham’s art and his craft, reporting from hot spots is my art and my craft. I wish I’d said that to the clan earlier.
Aoife giggles in her sleep, then groans sharply.
I go over. “You okay, Aoife? It’s only a dream.”
Unconscious Aoife complains, “No, silly! The lemon one.” Then her eyes flip open like a doll’s in a horror movie: “We’re going to a hotel in Brighton later, ’cause Aunty Sharon’s marrying Uncle Pete, and we’ll meet you there, Daddy. I’m a bridesmaid.”
I try not to laugh, and stroke Aoife’s hair back from her face. “I know, love. We’re all here now, so you go back to sleep. I’ll be here in the morning and we’ll all have a brilliant day.”
“Good,” Aoife pronounces, teetering on the brink of sleep …
… she’s gone. I pull the duvet over her My Little Pony pajama top and kiss her forehead, remembering the week in 1997 when Holly and I made this precious no-longer-quite-so-little life-form. The Hale-Bopp Comet was adorning the night sky, and thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide in San Diego so their souls could be picked up by a UFO in the comet’s tail and be transported to a higher state of consciousness beyond human. I rented a cottage in Northumbria and we had plans to go hiking along Hadrian’s Wall, but hiking didn’t turn out to be the principal activity of the week. Now look at her. I wonder how she sees me. A bristly giant who teleports into her life and teleports out again for mystifying reasons, perhaps—not so different from how I saw my own father, I guess, except while I’m away on various assignments, Dad went away to various prisons. I’d love to know how Dad saw me when I was a kid. I’d love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I’d be one day to look inside it.
When I was back in February she was having her period.
I hear Holly’s key in the door. I feel vaguely guilty.
Not half as guilty as she’ll make me feel, though.
Holly’s having trouble with the lock so I go over, put the chain on, and open it up a crack. “Sorry, sweetheart,” I tell her, in my Michael Caine voice. “I never ordered no kinky massage. Try next door.”
“Let me in,” says Holly, sweetly, “or I’ll kick you in the nuts.”
“Nope, I didn’t order no kick in the nuts, neither. Try—”
Not so sweetly: “Brubeck, I need to use the loo!”
“Oh, all right, then.” I unchain the door and stand aside. “Even if you have come home too plastered to use a key, you dirty stop out.”
“The locks in this hotel are all fancy and burglar-proofed. You need a PhD to open the damn things.” Holly bustles past to the bathroom, peering down at Aoife in passing. “Plus I only had a few glasses of wine. Mam was there as well, remember.”
“Right, as if Kath Sykes was ever a girl to put the dampeners on a ‘wine-tasting session.’ ”
Holly closes the bathroom door. “Was Aoife okay?”
“She woke up for a second, otherwise not a squeak.”
“Good. She was so excited on the train down, I was afraid she was going to be up all night dancing on the ceiling.” Holly flushes the toilet to provide a bit of noise cover. I go over to the window again. The funfair at the end of the pier is winding down, by the look of it. Such a lovely night. My proposed six-month extension for Spyglass in Iraq is going to wreck it, I know. Holly opens the bathroom door, smiling at me and drying her hands. “How did you spend your quiet night in? Snoozing, writing?”
Her hair’s up, she’s wearing a low-cut figure-hugging black dress and a necklace of black and blue stones. She hardly ever looks like that anymore. “Thinking impure thoughts about my favorite yummy mummy. Can I help you out of that dress, Miss Sykes?”
“Down, boy.” She fusses over Aoife. “We’re sharing a room with our daughter, you might have noticed.”
I walk over. “I can operate on silent mode.”
“Not tonight, Romeo. I’m having my period.”
Thing is, I haven’t been back often enough in the last six months to know when Holly’s period is. “Guess I’ll have to make do with a long, slow snog, then.”
“ ’Fraid so matey.” We kiss, but it’s not as long and slow as advertised, and Holly isn’t as drunk as I was half hoping. When was it that Holly stopped opening her mouth when we kiss? It’s like kissing a zipped-up zip. I think of Big Mac’s aphorism: In order to have sex, women need to feel loved; but in order for men to feel loved, we need to have sex. I’m keeping my half of the deal—so far as I know—but sexually, Holly acts like she’s forty-five or fifty-five, not thirty-five. Of course I’m not allowed to complain, because that’s pressurizing her. Once Holly and I could talk about anything, anything, but all these no-go areas keep springing up. It all makes me … I’m not allowed to be sad either, because then I’m a sulky boy who isn’t getting the bag of sweets he thinks he deserves. I haven’t cheated on her—ever—not that Baghdad is a hotbed of sexual opportunity, but it’s depressing still being a fully functioning thirty-five-year-old male and having to take matters into my own hands so often. The Danish photojournalist in Tajikistan last year would’ve been up for it if I’d been less anxious about how I’d feel when the taxi dropped me off at Stoke Newington and I heard Aoife yelling, “It’s Daaaaddyyy!”
Holly turns back to the bathroom. She leaves the door open, and starts to remove her makeup. “So, are you going to tell me or not?”
I sit on the edge of the double bed, alert. “Tell you what?”
She dabs cotton wool under her eyes. “I don’t know yet.”
“What makes you think I … have anything to tell you?”
“Dunno, Brubeck. Must be my feminine intuition.”
I don’t believe in psychics but Holly can do a good impression of one. “Olive asked me to stay on in Baghdad until December.”
Holly freezes for a few seconds, drops the cotton wool, and turns to me. “But you’ve already told her you’re quitting in June.”
“Yeah. I did. But she’s asking me to reconsider.”
“But you told me you’re quitting in June. Me and Aoife.”
“I told her I’d call back on Monday. After discussing it with you.”
Holly’s looking betrayed. Or as if she’s caught me downloading porn. “We agreed, Brubeck. This would be your final final extension.”
“I’m only talking about another six months.”
“Oh, f’Chrissakes. You said that the last time.”
“Sure, but since I won the Sheehan-Dower Prize I’ve been—”
“And the time before that. ‘Half a year, then I’m out.’ ”
“This’ll cover a year of Aoife’s college expenses, Hol.”
“She’d rather have a living father than a smaller loan.”
“That’s just”—you can’t call angry women “hysterical” these days; it’s sexist—“hyperbole. Don’t stoop to that.”
“Is that what Daniel Pearl said to his partner before he jetted off to Pakistan? ‘That’s just hyperbole’?”
“That’s tasteless. And wrongheaded. And Pakistan’s not Iraq.”
She lowers the toilet lid and sits on it so we’re roughly at eye level. “I’m sick of wanting to puke with fear every time I hear the word ‘Iraq’ or ‘Baghdad’ on the radio. I’m sick of hardly sleeping. I’m sick of having to hide from Aoife how worried I am. Fantastic, you’re an in-demand award-winning journalist, but you have a six-year-old who wants help riding a bike with no stabilizers. Being a crackly voice for a minute every two or three days, if the satphone’s working, isn’t enough. You are a war junkie. Brendan was right.”
“No, I am not. I am a journalist doing what I do. Just as he does what he does and you do what you do.”
Holly rubs her head like I’m giving her a headache. “Go, then! Back to Baghdad, to the bombs taking the front off your hotel. Pack. Go. Back to ‘what you do.’ If it’s more precious than us. Only you’d better get the tenants out of your King’s Cross flat ’cause the next time you’re back in London, you’ll be needing somewhere to live.”
I keep my voice low: “Will you please fucking listen to yourself?”
“No, you fucking listen to yourfuckingself! Last month you agree to quit in June and come home. Your high-powered American editor says, ‘Make it December.’ You say, ‘Uh, okay.’ Then you tell me. Who are you with, Brubeck? Me and Aoife, or Olive Sun and Spyglass?”
“I’m being offered another six months’ work. That’s all.”
“No, it’s not ‘all’ ’cause after Fallujah dies down or gets bombed to shit it’ll be Baghdad or Afghanistan Part Two or someplace else, there’s always someplace else, and on and on until the day your luck runs out and then I’m a widow and Aoife has no dad. Yes, I put up with Sierra Leone, yes, I survived your assignment in Somalia, but Aoife’s older now. She needs a dad.”
“Suppose I told you, ‘No, Holly, you can’t help homeless people anymore. Some have AIDS, some have knives, some are psychotic. Quit that job and work for … for Greenland supermarkets instead. Put all those people skills of yours to use on dried goods. In fact, I’m ordering you to, or I’ll kick you out.’ How would you respond?”
“F’Chrissakes, the risks are different.” Holly lets out an angry sigh. “Why bring this up in the middle of the bloody night? I’m Sharon’s matron of honor tomorrow. I’ll look like a hungover panda. You’re at a crossroads, Brubeck. Choose.”
I make an ill-advised quip: “More of a T-junction, technically.”
“Right. I’d forgotten. It’s all a joke to you, isn’t it?”
“Oh, Holly, for God’s sake, that’s not what I—”
“Well, I’m not joking. Quit Spyglass or move out. My house isn’t just a storage dump for your dead laptops.”
THREE O’CLOCK IN the morning, and things are fairly shit. “Never let the sun set on an argument,” my uncle Norm used to say, but my uncle Norm didn’t have a kid with a woman like Holly. I said “Good night” to her peaceably enough after switching off the lights, but her “Good night” back sounded very like “Screw you,” and she turned away. Her back’s as inviting as the North Korean border. It’s six o’clock in the morning in Baghdad now. The stars will be fading in the freeze-dried dawn, as skin-and-bone dogs pick through rubble for something to eat, the mosques’ Tannoys summon the devout, and bundles by the side of the road solidify into last night’s crop of dead bodies. The luckier corpses have a single bullet through the head. At the Safir Hotel, repairs will be under way. Daylight will be reclaiming my room at the back, 555. My bed will be occupied by Andy Rodriguez from The Economist—I owe him a favor from the fall of Kabul two years ago—but everything else should be the same. Above the desk is a map of Baghdad. No-go areas are marked in pink highlighter. After the invasion last March, the map was marked by only a few pink slashes here and there: Highway 8 south to Hillah, and Highway 10 west to Fallujah—other than that, you could drive pretty much wherever you wanted. But as the insurgency heated up the pink ink crept up the roads north to Tikrit and Mosul, where an American TV crew got shot to shit. Ditto the road to the airport. When Sadr City, the eastern third of Baghdad, got blocked off, the map became about three-quarters pink. Big Mac says I’m re-creating an old map of the British Empire. This makes the pursuit of journalism difficult in the extreme. I can no longer venture out to the suburbs to get stories, approach eyewitnesses, speak English on the streets, or even, really, leave the hotel. Since the new year my work for Spyglass has been journalism by proxy, really. Without Nasser and Aziz I’d have been reduced to parroting the Panglossian platitudes tossed to the press pack in the Green Zone. All of which begs the question, if journalism is so difficult in Iraq, why am I so anxious to hurry back to Baghdad and get to work?
Because it is difficult, but I’m one of the best.
Because only the best can work in Iraq right now.
Because if I don’t, two good men died for nothing.