THE NOISE OF the explosion died away, but half a dozen car alarms blasted out various pitches and patterns. I remembered being told that running outside wasn’t clever in case gunmen were watching the site to pick off survivors and rescue workers. I just lay there shaking for a bit, I didn’t know how long, until I got up and went back down to the lobby, my boots crunching on glass. Mr. Khufaji was crouched over the body of Tariq, the armed doorman, trying to curse him back to life. Probably I was the last person Tariq ever spoke to. Big Mac and some journalists were venturing out of the bar, nervous about a follow-up raid—often Bomber Number One clears the obstacles, while Bomber Number Two goes in and finishes off the tenderized targets.
The Safir was spared a double attack, however, and time lurched by until midnight. A paramilitary unit with an English-speaking “Detective Zerjawi” arrived sooner than usual because of the foreigners involved, and a torchlit survey of the hotel forecourt was carried out, with a shell-shocked Mr. Khufaji. I didn’t go. Big Mac said several cars out front had been blown to smithereens and he’d seen a few body parts. Detective Zerjawi theorized that one of the security guys had killed the other—there was only one body—and let the car bomber through. The bomber had planned on driving through the glass porch and into the lobby to detonate the explosives there, hoping to bring down the building. This plan had been frustrated by an obstacle in the car park—“Who knows?”—causing the bomb to go off outside. God had been good to us, Detective Zerjawi explained in the bar, so now he, too, would be good to us: For only eight hundred dollars, he would spare three of his very best officers to stand guard in the shot-out lobby. Otherwise, it would be very difficult to guarantee our safety until the morning. Terrorists would know how vulnerable we were.
After organizing a whip-round, some of us headed to our laptops to write up the story, others helped Mr. Khufaji with the clean-up, and a few went to bed and slept the sleep of the lucky-to-be-alive. I was too wired for any of the above, and went up onto the roof, and put a call through to Olive in New York. Her PA took the message: The Safir in Baghdad had been hit by a car bomb, but no journalists had been killed. I also asked the PA to get the message to Holly in London. Then I just sat there, listening to the bursts of gunfire, the drone of engines and generators, shouts, barks, brakes, music, and more gunfire: a Baghdad symphony. The stars were feeble for a browned-out city and the moon looked like it had liver disease. Big Mac and Vincent Agrippa joined me to make their satphone calls. Vincent’s wasn’t working, so I lent him mine. Big Mac gave us a cigar to celebrate not being dead and Vincent produced a bottle of fine wine from God knew where. Under the influence of Cuban leaf and Loire Valley grapes, I confided how I’d have been dead if it hadn’t been for a cat. Vincent, still a good Catholic, told me the cat was an agent of God. “Dunno what the cat was,” Big Mac remarked, “but you, Brubeck, are one lucky sonofa.”
Then I texted Nasser to say I was okay.
The message failed to arrive.
I texted Aziz to tell Nasser I was okay.
That message failed to arrive, too.
I texted Big Mac to check the network was working.
It was. Then a terrible possibility hit me.
PROBABLY THE WORST hour of Holly’s and my joint parenthood is already morphing into a multiuser anecdote, sprouting apocrypha and even one or two comic interludes. I told the jubilant crowd in the lobby I’d just had the thought that maybe Aoife had gone up two flights of stairs instead of one in search of her grandparents’ room so I’d gone to check, and found a chambermaid who’d let me into all the rooms. The third one along, my shot in the dark had hit its mark. Luckily everyone was too relieved to examine my story closely, though Austin Webber huffed and puffed about Health and Safety and how doors that locked children in were a liability. Pauline Webber declared, “Wasn’t it lucky you thought of that? Poor Aoife could’ve been trapped for days! You don’t want to think about it!” and I agreed. Dead lucky. I didn’t say what room number I’d found Aoife in: It all sounded too X-Files, and would’ve eclipsed Sharon and Peter’s wedding. Until, that is, twenty minutes ago, when, on the balcony of the Maritime Hotel, looking down on the nighttime pier, I told Holly the full version. As usual, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
“I’ll take a quick shower,” she said.
Aoife is tucked up in bed with Snowy, the Arctic fox.
A fleet of well-tuned motorbikes passes below.
WE’VE BEEN TALKING for ages. Which is a pleasant novelty. Holly’s lying next to me now, with her head on my shoulder and her thigh over my torso. We haven’t had sex, but still, there’s an intimacy I’d almost forgotten. “It was different from the glimpses I used to get,” Holly’s explaining, “y’know, the glimpses of stuff that hadn’t happened yet. The precognition.”
“Was it more like the Radio People, when you were little?”
Long pause. “Today it was as if I was the radio.”
“Like you were channeling someone else?”
“It’s hard to describe. It’s disturbing. Blanking out like that. Being in your body, but not being in your body. So embarrassing, too, coming back to myself with everyone standing round me like a—a Victorian deathbed scene. Christ only knows what the Webbers thought.”
I’ve always put inverted commas around Holly’s “psychic stuff” but today this same psychic stuff won us our daughter back. My agnosticism’s badly shaken. I kiss her head. “Write about it, one day, darling. It’s … fascinating.”
“As if anyone’d be interested in my bonkers ramblings.”
“You’re wrong. People ache to believe there’s more than …”
Screams from the funfair on the pier travel over the calm sea and through the slightly open window.
“Hol,” I realize I’m going to say it all, “Nasser in Baghdad, my minder, and Aziz Al-Karbalai, my photographer. They were killed in the car bomb at the Safir last week. They’re dead because of me.”
Holly rolls off me and sits up. “What are you talking about?”
HOLLY CLASPS HER knees to her chest. “You should’ve told me.”
I dab my eyes on the sheet. “Sharon’s wedding bash wasn’t the right time or place. Was it?”
“They were your colleagues. Your friends. S’pose Gwyn died, and I clammed up for days before telling you. Was there a funeral?”
“Yeah, for … the remains of them. But it was too dangerous for me to go.” Drunken laughter lopes down the corridor outside our room. I wait for it to pass. “It was too dark to see much at night, but at dawn, when the sun came up, there were just … twisted pieces of the bomber’s car, and of Nasser’s Corolla … Mr. Khufaji keeps a—a—a few topiary shrubs in pots up front, y’know, bushes clipped into shapes. A token gesture of more civilized days. Between two of those pots, there was a—a—a shin, with a foot attached and a—a canvas shoe. God knows, I saw worse in Rwanda, and your average grunt in Iraq sees worse twenty times a day. But when I recognized the shoe—it was Aziz’s—I puked myself inside out.” Get a grip. “Earlier, Nasser’d recorded interviews with patients from a clinic outside Fallujah. The next day, this is just one week ago, he was going to come over and transcribe them. He gave me the Dictaphone for safekeeping. We said good night. I went into the hotel. Nasser’s ignition was knackered, so Aziz probably got out to push-start it, or hook up a jump-lead, more likely. The bomber was aiming at the lobby, maybe hoping to bring down the building, I dunno, maybe it would’ve worked, it was a sizable blast, but anyway the car slammed into Nasser’s and …” Get a grip. “God, I’ve got tears coming out of my nose now. Is that even anatomically possible? So, yeah—Nasser’s daughters don’t have a daddy now because Nasser dropped me off late, at car-bombing time, at a Westerners’ hotel.”
From next door’s TV I hear a Hollywood space battle.
She touches my wrist. “You do know it’s not that simple? As you always told me when I used to beat myself up over Jacko.”
Aoife, in her dreams, makes a noise like a friendless harmonica.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s 9/11, it’s Bush and Blair, it’s militant Islam, the occupation, Nasser’s career choices, Olive Sun and Spyglass, a clapped-out Corolla that wouldn’t start, tragic timing, oh, a million little switches—but also me. Ed Brubeck hired them. Nasser needed to feed his family. I am why he and Aziz were there …” I choke up and steady myself. “I’m an addict, Holly. Life is flat and stale when I’m not working. What Brendan denied implying yesterday, it’s true. The whole truth, nothing but the truth. I … I’m a war-zone junkie. And I don’t know what to do about it.”
HOLLY’S CLEANING HER teeth, and a slab of vanilla light falls across Aoife. Look at her, this bright, bonkers, no-longer-so-little girl, who revealed herself from the mystery of ultrasound scans, nearly seven years ago. I remember us giving friends and family the big news; surprised joy from the Sykes clan and amused glances as Holly added, “No, Mum, Ed and I won’t be getting married. It’s 1997, not 1897”; and my own mum—whose leukemia was already getting to work on her bone marrow—saying, “Oh, Ed!” before bursting into tears and me asking, “Why’re you crying, Mum?” and her laughing, “I don’t know!”; and “Bump” swelling up until Holly’s navel was inverted; and Bump’s kicks; sitting in the Spence Café in Stoke Newington and compiling lists of girls’ names—Holly just knew, of course; and my irrational anxiety during my trip to Jerusalem about London ice and London muggers; then on the night of November 30 Holly calling from the bathroom, “Brubeck, find your car keys”; and a dash to the maternity ward, where Holly got axed and shredded alive by a whole new pain called childbirth; and clocks that went at six times the speed of time, until Holly was holding a glistening mutant in her arms and telling her, “We’ve been expecting you”; and Dr. Shamsie the Pakistani doctor insisting, “No, no, no, Mr. Brubeck, you will snip the cord, you absolutely must. Don’t be squeamish—you’ve seen much worse on assignment”; and last, the mugs of milky tea and the plate of Digestive biscuits in a small room down a corridor. Aoife was discovering the joys of breast milk, and Holly and I found that we were both bloody ravenous.
Our very first breakfast as a family.