Iain Banks - Complicity

My head hurts like buggery; my hearing feels… blurred. That's not the right word but it is. Eyes shut. They were shut with something earlier, shut by something, but not any more, at least I don't think so; I sense light beyond my eyelids. I'm lying on my side on something hard and cold and gritty. I'm cold, and my hands and feet are tied, or taped. I shiver uncontrollably, scraping my cheek across the chill, granular floor. Bad taste in mouth. The air smells sharp and I can hear…

I can hear the dead men, hear their flayed souls, wailing on the wind to no ear save mine and no understanding at all. The view behind my eyelids goes from pink to red then purple into black, and is suffused with a rumbling shift into a terrible, tearing roaring noise, shaking the ground, filling the air, pounding my bones, dark going dark, black stinking hell o mum o dad o no no please don't take me back there

And I'm there, in the one place I've hidden from myself; not that cold day by the hole in the ice or the other day in the sunlit woods near the hole in the hill — days deniable because I was then not yet the me I have become — but just eighteen months ago; the time of my failure and my simple, shaming incapacity to reap and work the obvious power of what I was observing; the place that exposed my incompetence, my hopeless inability to witness.

Because I was there, I was part of it, just a year and a half ago, after months and months of badgering, cajoling and entreating Sir Andrew he finally let me go when the deadline was up and the trucks and tracks and tanks were about to roll I got my wish, I got to go, I was given the chance to do my stuff and show what I was made of, to be a genuine front-line journalist, a rootin-tootin-tokin-tipplin God-bijayzuz gonzo war correspondent, bringing the blessed Saint Hunter's manic subjectivity to the ultimate in scarifying human edge-work: modern warfare.

And forgetting the fact the drinks were few and far between and that the whole media-managed event was so unsportingly one-sided and mostly happened far away from any journos, tendance gonzoid or not, when it came to it — and it did come to it, I did have my chance, it was put right there in front of me practically screaming at me to fucking write something — I couldn't do it; couldn't hack it as a hack; I just stood there, awestruck, horrorstruck, absorbing the ghastly force of it with my inadequate and unprepared private humanity, not my public professional persona, not my skill, not the face I had laboured to prepare to face the sea of faces that is the world.

And so I was humbled, scaled, down-sized.

I stood on the sunless desert, beneath a sky black from horizon to horizon, a rolling, heavy sulphurous sky made solid and soiled, packed with the thick, stinking effluence squeezed erupting from the earth's invaded bowels, and in that darkness at noon, that planned, deliberated disaster, with the bale-fire light of the burning wells flickering in the distance with a dirty, guttering flame, I was reduced to a numb, dumb realisation of our unboundedly resourceful talent for bloody hatred and mad waste, but stripped of the means to describe and present that knowledge.

I crouched on the tar-black grainy stickiness of the plundered sands, within scorching distance of one of the wrecked wells, watching the way the fractured black metal stub in the centre of the crater gouted a compressed froth of oil and gas in quick, shuddering, instantly dispersing bursts and bubbles of brown-black spray into the furious, screaming tower of flame above; a filthy hundred-metre Cypress of fire, shaking the ground like a never-ending earthquake and bellowing madly in a strident jet-engine shriek, shuddering my bones and jarring my teeth and making my eyes tremble in their sockets.

My body shook, my ears rang, my eyes burned, my throat was raw with the acid-bitter stench of the evaporating crude, but it was as though the very ferocity of the experience unmanned me, unmade me and rendered me incapable of telling it.

Later, on the Basra road, by that vast linearity of carnage, a single strip of junk-yard destruction stretching — again — from horizon to horizon on the flat dun face of that dusty land, I wandered the scorched, perforated wreckage of the cars and vans and trucks and buses left after the A10s and the Cobras and the TOWs and the miniguns and the thirty-mill cannons and the cluster munitions had had their unrestrained way with their unarmoured prey, and saw the brown-burned metal, the few bubbled patches of sooty paint, the torn chassis and ripped-open cabs of those Hondas and Nissans and Leylands and Macks, their tyres slack and flattened or quite gone, burned to the steel cording inside; I surveyed the spattered shrapnel of that communal ruin rayed out across the sands, and I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be caught here, beaten, retreating, running desperately away in those thin-skinned civilian vehicles while the missiles and shells rained in like supersonic sleet and the belching fire burst billowing everywhere around. I tried, too, to imagine how many people had died here, how many shredded, cindered bodies and bits of bodies had been bagged and removed and buried by the clean-up squads before we were allowed to see this icon of that long day's slaughter.

I sat on a low dune for a while, maybe fifty metres away from the devastation on the strip of ripped, bubbled road, and tried to take it all in. The lap-top sat on my knee, screen reflecting the grey overcast, the cursor winking slowly at the top-left edge of the blank display.

I gave it half an hour and still couldn't think of anything that would describe how it looked and how I felt. I shook my head and stood up, twisting back to dust my pants.

The black, charred boot was a couple of metres away, half-buried in the sand. When I picked it up it was surprisingly heavy because it still had the foot inside it.

I wrinkled my nose at the stink and let it drop, but it still didn't help, didn't break the log-jam, didn't (ha) kick-start the process.

Nothing did.

I filed a minimum of uninspired war-is-hell-and-frankly-so-is-peace-if-you're-female-out-here stories from the hotel and smoked some mind-bendingly powerful dope I got from an affable Palestinian helper who — as soon the journos left — was picked up by the Kuwaiti authorities, tortured and deported to Lebanon.

When I got back Sir Andrew told me he wasn't at all impressed with the stuff I'd filed; they could have run AP stories for a lot less money and just as much impact. I didn't have an argument against this, and so had to sit there and take the old man's verbal battering for half an hour. And, even though at the time I knew it was wrong, unjustifiable and a feeble, contemptible piece of self-important self-pity, for a while, under that withering deluge of professional contempt, I felt like something trapped and pulverised amongst the dust and greasy ashes on the Basra road.

I'm hearing the cries of the dead men above the roar of the screeching, broken well-heads, and I smell the thick, cloying brown-black oil and the sweet gagging odour of corruption; then the cries turn to the calls of seagulls, and the smell to that of the sea, with an acrid overtone of bird-shit.

I'm still tied up. I open my eyes.

Andy is sitting across from me, his back against a rough concrete wall. The floor underneath us is concrete, as is the roof. There is a doorway to Andy's left; no door, just a pitted aperture to the sunlight outside. I can see more concrete buildings, all derelict, and a skinny concrete tower spattered with seagull droppings. Beyond there are chopping waves rolling white at their tops, and a glimpse of distant land. The wind sighs through the doorway over little stones and shards of glass; I can hear waves hitting rocks. I blink, looking at Andy.