Jon Grimwood - Effendi

“It’s a disgrace,” she said, sounding furious.

Raf stopped playing. “I’m sorry. Does it break the machine?”

“No, no . . .” Pink fingers folded over his own, swallowing them. Her grip was so tight that it hurt. “I don’t mean what you’re doing to their machine.” Anna’s voice had a sob in it. “This.” She jerked her chin towards the electronic bed, then round the small room. “All of this.”

“They’re mending me,” Raf explained patiently.

“Mending you?”

The boy nodded. “New kidneys,” he said, “improved breastbone and something to make my body mend faster when I get hurt. I don’t mind, it’s better than lessons.”

“Lessons?”

“I have to do lessons . . .”

She smiled. “I wasn’t mad about school either. Why don’t you like yours?”

“Boring,” said Raf. “ Boring, boring, boring . . . No one ever says anything new. It’s just what’s already in the textbooks.”

“You can read?”

He looked at Anne as if she was mad. “Of course I can read,” he said. “I’m five.”

The nurse thought about that for a while. As she did so, she jotted notes on a chart and swung her foot, so her sole scuffed the floor with each swing. Wherever the thoughts went, they didn’t lead her anywhere she wanted to go.

“Do you like it here?”

Raf shrugged. “It’s okay. Better than the Tigris . . .”

Her look was a question.

“My mother’s ship. It smells dirty and I get sick. All that static . . .”

“She’s a sailor?”

“No,” Raf laughed. “She saves whales . . .”

She did too. And cut together award-winning films from hours of footage taken with a tiny camera taped to the side of her mask. The whales were killers and ate seals like Scooby snacks. Raf often wondered why she didn’t save the Scooby snacks instead.

“Enough,” Raf told the cat, wiping vomit from his shoes with a handkerchief taken from his jacket. Somehow a fresh one materialized in his top pocket every morning. Like eating lunch in the kitchen, it seemed ordinary tissues weren’t for people like him.

Raf shrugged and screwed the soiled linen into a ball, pushing it deep into a trouser pocket. He was alone on the roof, Avatar having agreed to take the dusty hire car only after Raf marched him to the front door.

Av had been too weak to go, even after Raf had put back the lights, wiped down the door handles and carefully explained exactly why he should. So, to save time, Raf had cheated, ramping the kid up on a foil twist of speedballs taken from the driver’s wallet.

“This will help you walk,” Raf told him. “You want that, don’t you?”

Avatar nodded, eyes huge.

“Yeah, figured.” Raf had dropped to a crouch beside Avatar’s soiled mattress, with the driver’s dropped lighter in one hand and the foil twist in his other. “Suck the smoke,” said Raf and put a flame to the foil.

Avatar gagged.

“Slowly.” Raf’s voice was soft, its tone soothing. He needed the boy out of the house and soon. Which bizarrely meant stopping Avatar from taking in too much smoke at once.

“Who are you?”

Raf stared at the boy, whose skin was as smooth as Italian leather in the overhead light. High cheekbones had become visible where there’d been adolescent softness only months before. The kid was Renaissance beautiful and part of that beauty was that Avatar didn’t yet know it. To make matters more complicated, Avatar had his sister’s eyes. Hurt and all.

Raf sighed. “I’m your boss, remember . . .”

“You fired me!”

“You kind of fired yourself.”

“Well.” Avatar’s smile was sad. “Maybe.” He rolled sideways off his mattress and stood unsteadily. Around him the cellar seemed to rock and then settle. “I could work for you again,” Avatar suggested.

“As of now, you do,” said Raf and turned the kid towards the door, watching him walk away, weak from hunger and dizzy with smoke.

“About Zara . . .” Avatar said over his shoulder.

“What about her?”

“She’s . . .” Avatar searched in vain for the accurate word. “Cool, I suppose.”

“So everyone keeps telling me.”

“She’s also in love with you.”

Raf sighed and tossed Avatar the car keys. Adding an inevitable clang to his collection of sounds.

Ka could see Sarah’s mouth open but her words were gone. Tears ebonied her cheeks and snot ran from her nose. His one attempt to put an arm round her had seen Sarah push him so hard that he almost fell over a small cliff.

It was Zac, Ka realized, tiny and doll-like in the river amid silver flashes.

Leaving Sarah where she stood, Ka ran through the wadi until, halfway down, rock crumbled under his feet and for a few blessed seconds all Ka’s attention went on staying upright.

Then he was at the water’s edge and reality came flooding in. Half-smoked perch were pegged out on twigs over the fire pit; but the real stink came from the humans, who had all been dead for hours by the look of it. Those bruises dead people get were already present wherever flesh touched ground.

Their fire pit was sodden with urine and Zac’s ripped-open rucksack had been tossed on top of the cold embers. Everywhere had been searched and nothing found; because what the soldiers wanted still shaded Ka’s eyes from the sun.

Bec had two bullet holes, one in her stomach and another below a breast. One shoe was missing and her rifle empty. Saul had a bullet through his good shoulder and another in his leg. He’d been finished with a rifle butt to the temple. Zac was a head shot, close up and through the back of his skull. The kid had fallen where he knelt.

UN-issue, 90–2 ammo meant nothing. All sides took weapons where they could capture them, ammo too. As for Sarah’s felucca, a tossed grenade had reduced that to kindling, sending more dark-eyed perch to the surface.

“How did they get here?”

“Combat hovercraft, Thornycroft Mk 11, grade 5 stealth profile . . .”

Ka didn’t listen. He’d been talking to himself anyway and since there weren’t any track marks or, come to that, any tracks down which trucks could have come, he’d been on the point of working out that the enemy had used some kind of boat.

“We have to bury them.”

“No,” said Ka and held up one hand, as if that was enough to hold back her bubbling anger. “The Colonel says we can’t take that risk.”

Her answer was a glare.

“I want to,” said Ka. “They were my friends too.” Which wasn’t quite true. Saul was a bully and he’d never got to know Bec, but Ka knew the three of them had been together since Kordofan. And Zac . . . Zac had been Ka’s responsibility. “But what if the troops come back to make another search . . . ?”

Sarah said nothing.

“They’ll know some of us are still alive and come looking with planes. What . . . ?” said Ka, seeing Sarah’s face suddenly harden.

“You’re afraid.”

“Afraid? I’m scared shitless. You, me . . . it’s just a matter of time.”

“The will of God,” Sarah said.

“You believe that?”

She thought about it. “I used to, kind of still do. Maybe I just want . . .”

“Yeah.” Ka put his arm round her shoulders and this time she didn’t push him away . . .

In the back of the truck was a thermoflage net, fitted with a pocket at each corner that could be filled with stones or loaded with sand, for when the terrain was impossible to peg. As well as blanking out thermal signatures, the huge net stealthed radar. Or so the Colonel said and whatever that meant, it sounded good.