Agnes looked at Jeremiah, Jeremiah looked at Agnes.
There was a moment when Agnes thought of the words that should have come, the fuck you, the we don’t want your pity, the fuck you world fuck you world fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK
but her grandfather, who had loved her and raised her after Mum died, who had fought even though his strength was failing, and he was so old now, older this last week than she’d ever thought he could be—her grandfather was cold, and frail in the middle of the road, and she looked at the Harbinger of Death and thought that perhaps he too was frightened, and didn’t really know what he was doing or what he was saying, but that it mattered to him more than anything that he said it, and so she nodded just once and said, “Yeah. Okay. Thanks.”
Charlie nodded in reply, and the three walked in silence through the night.
Chapter 39
“Charlie …”
“Saga …”
“It’s completely …”
“I just wanted your advice.”
“Did you think that …”
“Because I don’t want to overstep, but this didn’t feel like …”
“You’re a free man!”
“Within the constraints of the …”
“A job is just a job. You know that. The job is just the job.”
“As Harbinger of Death, did you … When you had my job, did you ever …”
“Of course I did. Of course. She didn’t mind. You’re only human. Charlie? What have you done?”
“There was this old man and his granddaughter.”
“Ah—a classic. Clichéd, even! The young, the old, your heart bled a little to see …”
“No. No, not that. Just … Well, maybe that. In Greenland the ice broke and a man died and I felt so tiny. What can one man do? And here … In Germany they took in a million refugees, welcomed them with flowers, food, old women gave up their homes, strangers invited other strangers to sleep on their sofas, without another thought, and then in Cologne on New Year’s Day …”
“You’re concerned.”
“No. It’s not …”
“The job?”
“Silly to worry about work.”
“Silly, yes, silly. But then again, Charlie, the work is life.”
“Is …”
“Life, yes, as I said. When you are Harbinger of Death, you go before, and before there is death, there is life. You go to greet and to honour the living. It would be ridiculous, obscene even, if you didn’t honour life. What music have you been listening to?”
“What? There was … there’s a choir at SOAS, international music, also a secular choir, at Christmas they …”
“Charlie. You are a bridge. You stand between life and death, sometimes in a very literal sense. It is very important—most important—that you are human. That you see humanity in everything you do. Otherwise you do not accord to the living the honour that they are due from Death herself. Charlie? It is human to care.”
“So I shouldn’t …?”
“No.”
“And it’s okay to …”
“Absolutely.”
“But why this one? I haven’t been in this job long, but Mama Sakinai died and it was … I didn’t feel like I should try to save her—ridiculous word, ‘save.’ I’m sorry, you must think I’m …”
“It was her time, and she was not afraid.”
“No. I suppose she wasn’t.”
“And the ones you’ve helped today?”
“It is not their time. It is … it is not their time.”
“Injustice—you will meet that too, you know. Sometimes the bus that slips off the motorway is full of children. You will have to be there for them too, and you cannot stop the ice when it is time for it to melt.”
“I … I know. But this once … just for a while … I thought maybe I could help.”
“That’s good. You may think it doesn’t make a difference; it does. One person at a time, it makes a difference.”
“Thank you. I thought perhaps … but thank you.”
“Any time, Charlie. Any time.”
Three people sit in a flat in Dulwich and watch the TV.
The words they hear; though they watch the same things, they hear differently, and Jeremiah Young, already half asleep, head on one side, breathing loud through his nose, hears …
“… the sea turtle as it lays its eggs knows that only some of its children will make it to the ocean’s safety. Her brood safely buried, she crawls back the way she came, slipping down into the safety of the darkness before the tide can turn …”
Agnes Young, who’s got work tomorrow morning and is scared she’ll lose her job, because she’s been distracted, short-tempered, moody and sometimes late to the shop—but hasn’t said anything, didn’t want to make a big deal of it, it’s just … it’s her problem, her shit, that’s all—Agnes Young watches the TV and hears …
“Will they find true love on the paradise holiday, or will those grapes turn sour? And also, after the break, our magical couples go jet-skiing: ‘I was like, I thought I was going to die’ … and climb a mountain for the perfect romantic photo opportunity: ‘Oh my God! It’s just … it’s like … wow, oh my God, it’s just so amazing!’ … and we reveal Hunky Josh’s big secret! All this, after the break …”
And the Harbinger of Death sits beside this strange pair on his too-small sofa, and watches the TV, and for tonight hears only voices, lifted in celebration, and smiles, and is content.
Part 4
RATS
Chapter 40
“If we were to go to have a coffee together—no, that wouldn’t be acceptable. I’m a married woman, and being alone with a man who’s not my husband, who knows where it might lead? I mean, I don’t think with you it would lead anywhere, but you never know, so I just avoid the risk. It’s an important part of what this is about—avoid the risk, that’s all.”
“Why would you do that to your body? Why would you stain your body for ever? I just don’t understand it, I think it’s wrong, frankly, just wrong …”
“So it’s sixty pounds for the membership, and then another twenty a week for personal trainer sessions, and like maybe thirty-five pounds a week for you know, the supplements and that, and then fifty pounds every two weeks for hair and nails, so what’s that … Yeah, I know, but like, this is how I feel good, like, this is how I’m someone, someone who actually matters.”
“… and then he was like, ‘I’ll put the pictures online’ and I was like, ‘I don’t fucking care if you put the pictures online, you look like a douche too’ and he was like, ‘Give me cash’ and I just laughed at him, fuck that, I mean, it’s my body, it’s just my body …”
“When I go to the men’s section I sit behind a screen, but sometimes if a man comes over to the women’s area then he has to sit behind a screen too. I mean, the protection, it works both ways …”
“So. These photos. Obviously it’s sending a bad message to our clients.”
“It’s four and a half thousand dollars for the donor, plus passport costs, then we sell on to the broker in Saudi, who takes his cut, and he arranges transportation to the recipient, who’s usually paying about seventy-two thousand dollars for a good kidney match …”
“To quote a dead white man: ‘Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.’ I’ll tell you who said it later …”
“Actually, I think money isn’t a bad metric at all for assessing a person’s value to society. Seriously, what else are you going to use?”
Chapter 41
The Harbinger of Death and the Harbinger of War met at Esenboga international airport.
“Charlie! Oh Charlie!” sang out the Harbinger of War, as Charlie wandered through the international departures lounge in search of a water fountain or a cup of tea.
“Marion—what are you …?” A limp gesture round the hall. Esenboga was like every international airport in the w
orld, a terminal opened to serve the growing Ankara traffic, glass ceilings, white floors, escalators, orange letters on the electric departure boards, the same shops selling the same clothes, the same coffee, the same inflatable neck pillows and the same travel padlocks, broken with a single tap of the hammer. Arrival, departure, arrival, departure—sometimes it felt like Charlie’s life was one sort of waiting room or another.
“Catching the 1714 to Warsaw—another terrible tour of Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic Sea, you know how it is.” She paused to kiss Charlie once on either cheek, her fading brown-grey hair piled on top of her skull, her beige linen trousers ruffled from travel. “Had to stop off in Ankara to visit a peace march, the Kurds, the Turks, the Turks, the Kurds, it never ends; came through Gaza, Egypt, Libya, the usual spots. The service in some of my usual hotels has gone absolutely downhill—it’s the death of the tourist industry, I can tell you that. Where are you heading? Not Sudan again?”
“No—Syria, maybe Iraq.”
“Ghastly! Used to be so wonderful, so wonderful, and now—did you ever see Palmyra?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And now the state of things! Well don’t let me hold you up, busy busy busy, give my love to the old place!”
So saying, she headed in the opposite direction, and Charlie continued his search for a lovely cup of tea.
Chapter 42
The first time Charlie met Qasim Jahani, the war in Syria was only a few months old, and Charlie was very new to the job. He had travelled almost directly from Mama Sakinai to Turkey, and his heart filled with busy, bustling excitement as he queued at passport control, looking at the faces around him and wondering if anyone knew, if anyone could sense the importance of his office, the scale of the duty he had to perform.
Children cried, travellers grumbled, no one met anyone else’s eye, and it seemed that, despite the magnitude of the responsibility upon him, only he knew of its might.
When Charlie had signed up for the job, he’d had a feeling he would be sent into war zones, of course, and the thought hadn’t bothered him. If anything, it had been an attraction, an opportunity to finally see all the images that lay just outside the frame of the news camera, to hear voices that weren’t edited to a few words meant to encapsulate the conflict for viewers with limited patience for complexity, and yes, to one day return and be able to look his friends—already a fading, distant brood—in the eye and say, I was there, I saw this, it has changed me, but I endure, picture it if you can.
The thought that he might be harmed hadn’t really occurred to him. Why would Death send his Harbinger, if his Harbinger was going to die in the attempt? Only afterwards—after the ice—would the possibility grow in his mind.
At that time, as he crossed the still-open border to Syria, the war was largely a civil war, though the quality of it was rapidly evolving into something else, something that didn’t have a name. The cluster bombs were beginning to fall on civilians, and suicide bombers had killed themselves outside police stations, and men with guns had hidden amongst schoolchildren, and tanks had shelled still-sleeping apartments, and somehow, as the rubble fell and the smoke billowed into the streets, it was becoming harder and harder to tell what anything was any more, and who was killing who, let alone why.
Civilian populace was an interesting turn of phrase, Charlie mused, as he rode through the towns of northern Syria in search of his quarry. Two words that somehow didn’t seem to cover the old women queuing for eggs, the smell of cumin from the kitchens, the children trying to out-stare the skittish stray cats, the schoolrooms where history was taught in the morning, emergency bomb drills in the afternoon. Civilian populace, in Charlie’s mind, implied a country where all things were frozen, as if every single person had, at the outbreak of war, become rooted to the spot, waiting for their turn to come.
Civilian populace was not a term that covered …
“You like football? I love football! I love Arsenal. Arsenal are the best. But they always let themselves down in the Champions League. They’re just like the English—one or two good players, a lot of hard workers and terrible at penalties!”
Was this war? Charlie wondered as he bought a football shirt from a beaming man who ran a five-a-side team on the outskirts of Aleppo. Was this what civilian populace meant?
“We haven’t been hit too badly by the fighting, I suppose, but my children—they haven’t been outside for nine months. They live in their bedroom, the kitchen and the bathroom. I have to let them watch more TV, when the power’s on. It’s the only way, but I don’t like it.”
Back then, back before the ice and the London rain, back when the aid agencies were still daring to operate across the Syria–Turkey and Lebanon–Syria borders, Charlie had snuck in with a convoy at the Akçakale–Tell Abiad crossing, where the proud face of Syria’s illustrious ruler still stared mightily into the middle distance in one direction, and trucks waited behind high yellow walls covered with razor wire to be inspected by the teams of men with dogs and guns on the other side. Just this once, when the border official asked him his job, Charlie replied that he was a nurse, and showed a fake letter that made him feel guilty whenever he unfolded it, remorse at abusing the name of an honourable charity to sneak in with his fake passport, his fake name, his weak Syrian Arabic.
He hadn’t imagined that he’d ever not travel as the Harbinger of Death, hadn’t imagined he’d need to lie. But as Milton Keynes put it …
“Certain places just aren’t pleased to see you. They don’t really understand the needfulness of the office, love.”
He’d half expected to be arrested there and then, but the soldiers looked at his letter, his passport, noted a few words from both down on a piece of tatty paper, and waved him through. He’d climbed back into the high front of the truck he was riding with, with its cargo of baby formula, and his driver had nodded once with his chin and said in inflected English, “Now you go see Syria, yes?”
Charlie nodded in answer, hardly daring to speak until the engine had growled back up to full and the truck was pulling away from the dusty compound, skirting the edge of the scraggy border in search of the open road.
Again, as the world rolled by in a cloud of sepia dust, divided occasionally into a rectangular field where hardy green-grey plants grew, crawling unevenly towards the sun, Charlie could not believe that this was a land at war. When the road joined the tip of a river valley, trees began to sprout proud and wide, towns offering Coca-Cola and petrol stations, rising and falling amid the fields and scattered, water-hugging orchards. Charlie half closed his eyes against the reflected pink brilliance of the sun, and smelt the exhaust from the motorway and the smoke from burning wood, and thought that perhaps he could drive for ever down this endless road to the south.
Then the checkpoints began, and the traffic grew thin. Sometimes the checkpoints were police, bearded men with Kalashnikovs slung across their bellies, who ranged from uninterested to infuriated as they studied Charlie’s passport, his letters. At one checkpoint, a man stood Charlie up against the side of the van and shouted at him, just shouted and kept on shouting, and Charlie looked nervously to the driver to see if any of the words being screamed at him, which were for the best part beyond his comprehension, should have him more than particularly worried.
Then the man spat at Charlie’s feet, and sent him on his way. At another checkpoint, a different man, a soldier, saw his passport and exclaimed in perfect, fluent French, “Ah, you are from Paris!”
“Yes,” Charlie lied in the same language, hoping his English accent didn’t show too heavily. “That’s right.”
“I love Paris, I studied at the Sorbonne, ah, such times, such good times, the river, the people, the language, the language it is still a pleasure to speak it …”
He shook Charlie’s hand: if you have any trouble, any at all, just mention my name …
… waved them on.
A few miles further down the dusty, near-empty road, Charlie turned to his compan
ion and said, “What was his name?”
The driver shrugged; he hadn’t been paying attention.
The first rebel checkpoint they met wasn’t really in service of a rebellion at all, but was a barrier laid across the street by the militia of a town a few miles off the main road, grubby men with ragged beards, a mishmash of weapons—hunting rifles, pistols, even the odd axe or two—assembled casually around the blockade.
Down, down, they gestured, and they climbed out of the truck, the sun now setting, the heat of the day burning away in an insect buzz. Charlie presented his passport, told his story, and the man in charge, grey-haired and silk-skinned, sniffed and said, “No. You are a liar. Go home.”
Charlie hesitated, then tried again, a medic, a mission, trying to get …
“We don’t need your medicine here, go home!”
He hesitated, looked to the driver, who still didn’t seem to care, looked back to the soldier and said, “I am the Harbinger of Death.”
This took some translating, with the driver finally stepping in, rattling off words that caused consternation, men now fingering their weapons a little closer as they re-examined Charlie by the fading light of day. Finally the captain said, “Come, come come come!” and limply Charlie followed him into what had to be militia headquarters, and which perhaps had been in another life a small bar or coffee house, where the TV on the wall still showed a grainy, bad signal beamed from the Turkish side of the border, football matches and soap operas about intrigue in the Ottoman court.
“You never loved me!” exclaimed a figure on the screen, her face obscured by the zigzag of interference, colours faded. “You only ever wanted the Vizierate for yourself!”
“Sit sit sit sit!”
Charlie sat, hands in his lap, back stiff and straight. Men came, men went.
“You harlot! You she-wolf! He will never be with you, never!”
After a while, the driver of the truck came in and with a shrug put Charlie’s meagre travel bag at his feet. “Good luck,” he said, holding out a meaty, mottled hand. Charlie shook it, mumbled something back, sat back down, waited.