Jill McGivering - The Last Kestrel

For my mother

I have seen a green country, useful to the race, Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished, Even the last rat and last kestrel banished – God bless us all, this was peculiar grace.

‘Report on Experience’ by Edmund Blunden

Cover Page

Title Page The Last Kestrel Jill McGivering

Epigraph I have seen a green country, useful to the race, Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished, Even the last rat and last kestrel banished – God bless us all, this was peculiar grace. ‘Report on Experience’ by Edmund Blunden

Prologue

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Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

The line was taut. The cord circles tightened into handcuffs, burning his wrists. He was propelled forward, dragged on the rope, stumbling over sand and stones on the leash. His neck craned backwards, his face towards the sky and the glare of the sun fired the cloth of his blindfold. His tongue flickered to his lips, tasted their dryness. Sweat blossomed on his scalp, trickled down his temples, stung chapped skin.

He was sick with shock, his limbs convulsing. The man had jumped him from behind, from nowhere, and knocked him to the ground. He had pinioned him, his knee hard in his back, and bound his eyes before he could twist his face to see. Who was he? He caught the stink of male sweat; his own, bitter with adrenalin, and, overlaying it, the thick meaty smell of the man.

He stretched the tendons of his neck and managed to move the cloth a fraction. The material was wound tightly round his head, pressing into his eyes and, as he lifted it, he created a narrow slit of light at the bottom. Light, there, below, just beyond his vision. His eyes bulged, forcing themselves downwards, straining towards his chin, to focus on the paper-thin line of brightness. Was that a blur of sand he could see, dancing with pinpricks of colour? His head was bursting with effort and fear.

He tried to take control of his body, to steady his breathing and, with it, his mind. This man is taking me somewhere. He has a plan for me. With this thought, hope rose. He almost giggled, intoxicated with it. If he were going to kill me, he would have done it by now. Wouldn’t he? Yes. Alhamdulillah. Thanks be to God. He grasped this hope and hugged it to him, a lifebelt thought. Yes. If he—

A sharp rock at his toes and he was tripping, his feet splayed. The cord closed its teeth more sharply round his wrists, biting into the skin. The rope jerked. Pain through his hands, a sudden white heat in his shoulder sockets, his arms. A rush of air on his face as he fell forward, crashing, bouncing hard against the ground. Air struck out of his chest, leaving him gasping. Fine sand rose in a cloud, filling his mouth, his nose, making him choke. The stink of grit close to his face, a smell of dead sand and desiccated dirt.

A pause. He was alive, breathing noisily in, out. His nostrils ran wet with mucus or blood. He tried to lift his head and opened his mouth a crack to speak. His eyes, encrusted with sand, were trying to force themselves open beneath the cloth. His tongue was thick. He held his breath to listen. He heard the man, close to him, exhale.

His head was held down, his face pressed into the sand. A weight on the back of his head. A foot. The hard sole of a boot. He bucked and twisted, trying to flip over, to turn his covered face to the man, to beg. The boot held him firm, standing on his skull, grinding his nose into the dirt, causing a hundred minute sharp stones to embed in his forehead, his chin. A wave of nausea brought bile into his throat, riding a swell of panic.

A metallic click. A gun being cocked. He opened his mouth to shout but no word came. The sharp stink of piss, hot and steamy. The sudden wetness in his groin. A searing flash of white light. Cleansing and bleaching everything in an instant. The halo of the gunshot Jalil didn’t live to hear.

The room was shabby and hot. Ellen, sitting cross-legged on the threadbare carpet, tried to shift her weight and ease herself into another position without attracting attention. Her knees were aching.

Dust hung heavy in the air, suspended in the shafts of early evening light which were pressing in through open windows. The furniture was sparse. Just an old-fashioned television on a stand, a vast dark-wood dresser, scraped and scuffed by several generations, and worn cushions scattered across the carpet and against the walls.

Jalil’s mother was kneading her hands, rhythmically squeezing one through the other, back and forth. Her head was bent, watching her fingers as if their restlessness surprised her. The skin was papery. The veins along the backs of her hands stood full and thick with purple blood, part of the map of her new shrinking self.

Her scarf was pulled forward, screening her face, although the only male present was her young son. He was squatting on his haunches beside her, pressed against her body for comfort. He was a thin boy of ten or eleven with protruding ears and a scab on his chin. He was too young to understand he’d become the man of the house.

The daughter, embarrassed by her mother’s silence, tried to take control. She leaned forward to Ellen to whisper. ‘You understand,’ she said. ‘A very big shock.’

‘Of course.’

The daughter pushed a dish of greasy long-grained rice towards Ellen. It was laced with flakes of nut and plump stock-rich raisins. Ellen added another spoonful to her plate. She broke off a piece of fresh ridged bread, warm and spongy, and wiped it round, pinching a piece of lamb and rice together with her forefingers. She leaned forward over the plastic cloth. It was spread out between them on the floor, dominating the room, covered with cheap glass dishes of home-cooked food, a litre bottle of Coca-Cola and a smatter of shot glasses.

She brought her hand to her mouth, pushed the food between her lips, even though she had no appetite. The lamb had been marinated in a pungent sauce and she chewed slowly. She knew the rules. They must press food on her even after she was sated, to show respect, and she, to show thanks, must eat it.

‘He has a friend there.’ The daughter’s voice faltered as she corrected herself. She was fiddling with the fabric of her headscarf, playing it between her long fingers, shading her eyes. ‘Had a friend.’

Ellen looked up. The daughter was nineteen or twenty, a little younger than Jalil. Her nose was broad and prominent, as his had been. Sitting so close to her mother, she looked a younger, less broken version of her, with clear olive skin and expressive eyes ringed with kohl. She’d already lost her father. Now she’d also lost her older brother, any uncle or cousin could push her into a hasty marriage.

‘His friend,’ Ellen asked her, ‘is he also a translator?’

The daughter nodded. ‘His name is Najib,’ she said. ‘An old classmate of his, also from Kabul.’

‘And he’s still in Helmand?’

‘Yes. Maybe now he can help you instead of Jalil.’ She breathed heavily. ‘With your reports.’

The girl attempted a smile but looked away and it crumpled. Ellen pushed a piece of lamb round her plate with her bunched fingers, struggling to find the will to eat. In four years of coming back and forth to Kabul to cover Afghanistan for NewsWorld, this was the first time she would work without Jalil. He’d been full of life, of talent; exactly the sort of man his country needed. His death sickened her. He should never have turned to the military for work. She looked round now at the faces that mirrored his.