The Abrupt Physics of Dying (23 page)

For a moment he hung there, not wanting to leave the flow of fresh air, until finally he could hold on no longer and dropped exhausted to the floor. He huddled in his corner, breathing hard, covered in sweat, cursing the darkness. He would have to find another way.

The Chemicals of Violence

Twice more the light came, and with it water and food. He ate the paste quickly now, gobbling it down, his body’s demand for calories overruling his senses’ recoil. Each time was the same, the door opening inwards, Shuffler’s hands reaching in, then his right foot sliding in the fresh bowls. Clay started to measure the placement of his empty bowls, moving them a couple of centimetres further from the wall with each successive delivery. And each time Shuffler reached in a little further.

Three days he had been here now, best guess. Not once had anyone spoken to him, or even entered his cell. The longer it went on, the weaker he got. He knew he had to act soon. He sat by the door and waited. They would come soon with water and food.

When he heard the footsteps, sometime later, he stood and positioned himself in the opposite corner of the cell so that he would be able to see Sharp and Shuffler as they opened the door and exchanged the bowls. He knew now that this corner would not be illuminated when the door opened, he would be in darkness. Clay crouched with his back to the corner, his hands over his eyes so that only a slit remained, and counted out the timing of the sounds, key, lock, close, ten steps sharp, twelve steps shuffle, stop, key, bolt. The door opened. Sharp was small, half Clay’s size, with baggy trousers and a thick moustache. He held open the door. Shuffler was taller, heavier, but not by much. Shuffler crouched down, reached in for the bowls. For a fraction of a second his head hovered on the threshold next to the steel doorframe, and then he pulled back, laid down the bowls, scraped them across the floor.

Clay sat in the darkness, trying to recall every detail. Neither man wore a uniform. Who were they? He had seen no weapons, but he hadn’t had a clear view. Either man could have been carrying a sidearm. It didn’t matter. Time passed. Clay rehearsed, playing the scene over and over in his mind. He dozed, woke, emptied his bowels, washed his hands with the water he had saved for this purpose, paced. It was coming. He placed the empty bowls a centimetre further away from the door than before, moved to the far wall. Soon now. He limbered up, stretched, felt his muscles work, broke a sweat.

The far door clanged shut. Clay moved to the hinge side of the door and waited against the far wall, his heart racing. He breathed deep, tried to steady himself. Sharp and Shuffler approached, their daily routine. Clay counted the steps. The bolt slid back, light burst into the cell. Shuffler reached in and picked up the first bowl. Clay waited until Shuffler’s hand disappeared, counted three, then charged. He hit the door at full pace, driving all his weight through into his shoulder. It was as if someone had driven a splintered stake between his ribs. The steel plate snapped forward on its hinges just as Shuffler reached in for the second bowl. Clay felt a hard bump as the door knocked Sharp aside and then a spongy thud as the edge smashed into Shuffler’s arm, pinning it against the steel frame. Shuffler screamed in agony as Clay leaned into the door, crushing the bone. Then he wrenched the door open, and half-blinded by the light and the pain piercing his side, pivoted around and threw himself through the opening.

Sharp was crouching on one knee, trying to stand, when Clay hit him with a full body tackle. The impact snapped Sharp back at the waist, sending his head down hard onto the concrete with a crack. Clay felt the man’s body go limp. Shuffler was lying on his back, holding his arm, screaming in pain, oblivious. Clay jumped to his feet, lined up Shuffler’s head and let go a withering side kick to the jaw. A tooth skipped out across the floor. Shuffler groaned and fell quiet. It had all taken a matter of seconds.

Clay hunched over, heart pounding. He was trembling. That old exhilaration pumped through him, a rampant overdose, the exquisite chemicals of violence blurring the pain, burning away every disguise. This was who he was. What war had made him. He tried to steady himself. He filled his lungs, held it, exhaled. He surveyed the room, a corridor. At the far end another door. He fumbled with Sharp’s jacket, found a set of keys in the pocket, walked to the door. With trembling hands he tried a key, two, three, the metal rattling against the housing. He looked back at the two men lying on the concrete under the harsh fluorescent light. He shuddered, tried another key. The lock turned. He pushed open the door and looked into a dimly lit stairway. Rough concrete flights, formwork imprints. He closed the door behind him, bolted the door and started up the stairs, naked but for a pair of shorts. Two flights and another door, a different key. Warm night air flooded over him as he stood staring out into a dark alleyway. He flung away the key and started to run.

He ran through the night, moving through empty streets and across stony fields, the cloudglow of the city in the distance his only compass. At first he moved well, fear taking over now, urging him on. But he was weak, he had lost blood, eaten little, and after a while he slowed to a walk, panting, the sweat coagulating cold and tacky on his skin.

He crossed a field of ploughed up stubble towards a stone wall. Beyond, a row of stunted trees, another field, the lights of Aden glowing on the horizon. Far off, a line of red tracers arced silently into the sky, and then seconds later the staccato sound of machine-gun fire came shifting on the breeze, and it was like belonging. He stumbled to the wall. It was waist-high, hand-laid, unmortared. He wiped his eyes. To his left, stones arranged in a small arc barbed out from the wall, a palm-leaf cover laid over, a shepherd’s hide. He dropped to his knees, crawled into the space, curled up and closed his eyes and let the night erase him.

This Will Hurt a Bit

21st May. Somewhere outside Aden, Southern Yemen

Someone was calling his name, somewhere in the distance. He tried to push it away, but each time the voice cycled back, again and again until he was mired in it, enmeshed. There was a vague sensation of being cradled, lifted from the ground. And then he was drinking, the water flowing down his throat and splashing cool over his face and neck, filling his cells. Again the voice calling his name. Open your eyes.

They are open.

‘Clay, wake up. It’s me, Hussein.’

It was a long time before he could stand. Hussein coaxed him up, bracing his shoulder under Clay’s arm on the undamaged side, hobbling him to an opening in the stone wall. Hussein lowered him to the ground, propped him up against the stones, pulled out a small Maglite and examined his face, eyes and the back of his head.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.’ Hussein tapped a Marlboro from a half-crushed softpack and offered it. Clay raised his arm to wave no and dropped it again with a sharp breath.

‘You missed all the fun,’ Clay said.

Hussein stood, smiled. ‘Wait here.’

Clay reached up, grabbed Hussein’s arm. ‘How long was I in there?’

‘It took me six days to find out where they’d taken you.’ Hussein exhaled a long curl of smoke. ‘And when I got there, you were gone.’

Six days. He put his head in his hands.

‘Well done, by the way, getting out.’

Clay looked up as if through a squall, tried to shift his weight, winced. The ember of a cigarette flared. Clay could smell tobacco smoke swirling about him. Vertigo loomed.

‘Don’t try to move,’ said Hussein. ‘Wait here. I’ll be back.’ And then he was gone.

After a while Clay wobbled to his feet, felt his soles raw against the coolness of the dirt. The sky was lightening, dawn a few hours off. The country here was flat, a tapestry of stone-walled fields pierced by the dark remnants of volcanic intrusions, dykes and sills, blood-red cinder cones. Stone watchtowers loomed over the fields like medieval sentinels. A vehicle approached, headlights searching across the landscape. Clay hid his eyes as the Pajero pulled up alongside him. Hussein wrapped a jacket around his shoulders and helped him into the passenger seat. Soon they were speeding along the highway, direction Aden.

‘Who were they?’ Clay finally managed.

Hussein frowned. ‘They just follow orders.’

‘Whose orders?’

‘Someone at the Ministry of Oil, here in Aden. I don’t know who.’

‘Petro-Tex.’

‘Whoever it is, they are not pleased with you,’ said Hussein. ‘Giving out information a little too freely.’

‘Ali,’ whispered Clay. ‘You’d think he’d care a little more about his own bloody people.’

Hussein glanced over at him. He looked surprised. ‘Would you?’ He stressed the first word.

Clay leaned forward and cradled his head in his hands. ‘No.’ He closed his eyes and let a wave of pain warp through his skull. His head had started to bleed again; he could feel the blood running slick and warm down the back of his neck. Hussein handed him a rag, and he jammed it onto the wound, held it down hard with his head between his knees, wobbling on the edge of consciousness.

On the outskirts of the city Hussein stopped the car and led him into a crumbling Soviet-era concrete building and up three flights of grimy steps to a dimly lit corridor. Hussein rapped on a door. An old man answered, let them in. He was dressed in a cheap woollen suit and a tie that looked as if it had never been unknotted. The apartment was cramped, every space covered in books or boxes. Hussein spoke to the man in a language Clay could not identify – was it Farsi? The old man gestured towards the kitchen, pulled out a chair and guided Clay to it.

The old man stood before him, reached up and placed his hand on Clay’s jaw, turned his head to one side, then the other. Without saying a word, he looked into Clay’s eyes, opened his mouth and peered inside, and then tilted his head forward to examine the wound. Then the old man went to the kitchen and returned with a basin of tepid water and a towel. He washed Clay’s head gently, wringing out the cloth in the basin, the water swirling red. He cut away the matted hair with scissors, continued cleaning the wound. The antiseptic burned like fire.

Clay could feel the suture thread tugging at his scalp as the old man worked. It took a long time. After, the old man bandaged his head with a compress and gauze, and sewed his lip. The pain was flawless, detailed.

‘This will hurt a bit,’ the old man said afterwards.

Clay laughed. The old man smiled.

The old man examined Clay’s ribs. He pointed to the scar in his side.

‘It’s old,’ said Clay. A couple of inches to the left and it would never have had the chance to get old. He had never understood it, this randomness.

The old man washed Clay’s torso with the wet towel. He was very gentle and careful and Clay felt very grateful to this old man. Then the old man brought a bottle of water and a glass, some flat bread, Yemeni-style scrambled eggs. ‘Drink,’ he said. ‘You must drink and eat.’

‘
Shukran
,’ Clay managed.

‘God bless you,’ the old man replied, handing him a bottle of painkillers.

Clay ate and drank a litre of water.

Hussein handed him a clean
thaub
, some thin cotton trousers and a black-and-white Palestinian
keffiyeh
. ‘Do you need help?’ he asked.

Clay shook his head no and walked to the bathroom and closed the door. A stranger looked out at him from the mirror, naked, underweight, hands propped on the edge of the basin, the glass cuts along his jaw just showing through a five-day beard, lower lip cut and swollen, swathes of blue under his eyes, deep black bruises along his ribcage. He stood in the tub and turned the tap and with the shower nozzle washed the caked excrement from his lower body. Then he dressed in the clean clothes and wrapped the
keffiyeh
around his head to cover the bandages. He could almost pass for a Yemeni.

Soon they were back in the big, new, white Pajero, heading East. Clay dozed, hanging in the shoulder harness, floating on a cushion of deadened pain. He was vaguely aware of the kilometres passing, slowing for a checkpoint, rolling through as Hussein flashed his ID, the soldiers standing aside, some saluting, the hiss of the road again. By the time he woke, they were well past Bir Ali and the sun was setting behind the mountains. Hussein looked over and reached into his jacket and handed him an envelope.

Inside was an Australian passport issued to a Declan W. Greene of Perth, Western Australia, W for Wyndham. Clay looked at the photograph, taken in Nicosia a year ago for his first Yemeni visa, his hair longer then, his face fuller. He flipped through the pages, examined a scattering of stamps from Australia, Indonesia, Canada, several Yemeni visas covering a span of three years, an entrance stamp to Oman dated two days ago, and a new valid entrance visa for Yemen. On the inside back cover someone had scribbled a series of numbers in pencil, ten in all, of varying length, and the word
dovetail
. A scrap of paper was folded into the back of the passport, details typed with
a fading ribbon: mother Mary Charlotte Greene, née Blanchard, deceased; father Dominic Curtis Greene, deceased. Only child. No living relatives. In the pouch there was also a Visa bank card, a valid Western Australian driver’s licence, an airline ticket from Muscat to Cairo departing in a month’s time on Egypt Airlines issued to D. Greene, and a Yemen government pass card, issued to the same name, folded in a black wallet. Clay looked over at Hussein.

‘Your new passport.’

A military transport truck flashed past in the opposite direction.

‘Declan Wyndham Greene?’

‘You, or who you used to be, have just been listed by the PSO and the CIA as an Ansar Al-Sharia operative, my friend.’

Clay swallowed hard. What had Rania said about the PSO and Al Qaeda working together? He had dismissed it as rubbish at the time, another Press inaccuracy.

‘So you are Declan W. Greene now. How does it feel?’ Hussein grinned and lit a smoke, steering wheel in one hand, lighter in the other.

Clay forced a laugh, looked out at the sea. Still heading East. After a while he turned and faced Hussein, studied the man’s face, the eyes drawn and crimped, shadowed. ‘Hussein,’ he said.

Hussein turned his head.

‘Enough bullshit.’

A resigned sigh, eyes back on the road.

‘I want to know who the hell you are, where we are going, and what the fuck is going on. Pull over now, or it’s going to hurt.’

‘What is?’

Clay braced his right foot against the door, pulled back his right fist. ‘When I break your jaw.’

Hussein looked disappointed. He slowed the car, pulled over to the shoulder and turned off the engine. Clay opened the door and stepped out onto the sand. They were very close to the sea, the beach just beyond a set of low dunes. He could hear the crash of the waves, the hiss of the water running up the beach.

Hussein walked to the back of the car, opened the tailgate and pulled aside a tarpaulin spread across the back cargo area. ‘Have a look,’ he said. ‘Everything you need should be there.’

Five heavy-duty aluminium cases were wedged into the rear of the vehicle. Clay unclasped the nearest, flipped open the lid. In the dim interior light he could see the instruments peering out from their foam cradles. A pH-EC meter, factory new, with all the calibration fluids, the instruction manual still in its sealed plastic sheath. He opened each case in turn. It was a portable laboratory, complete with sampling equipment, a variety of sample containers, gloves, and surprisingly, a scintillometer, the best you could get. Over thirty thousand dollars’ worth of equipment, he estimated.

Hussein handed him a camera – a brand new Olympus SLR. ‘We are going back to Al Urush,’ said Hussein. ‘And we are going to find out what is killing those children.’

‘That’s what Al Shams wants.’

‘Exactly.’

‘What about my driver? Do you know if he was released?’

‘That,’ said Hussein, tossing his cigarette to the ground, ‘I couldn’t tell you. Now, can we get going?’

Clay took a step back and stood looking at the aluminium cases. How could anyone have conjured up this much equipment, of this quality, here, now? It was too good to be true. And yet here were the means to determine the truth, set out in these cases.

‘OK, Hussein,’ said Clay, slamming the tailgate closed. ‘For
them
.’

Hussein reached into his pocket. ‘I almost forgot,’ he said, ‘I did manage to retrieve this. It might be helpful at some point.’

Clay caught the yellow fieldbook with both hands. The cover was battered and stained. He pulled off the rubber band and flipped through the pages of notes, the data scrawled in his Hittite hand, sketches, descriptions, thoughts, the twisted fragments of
dehydrated
dreams. His UK passport was tucked into the back cover.

‘And the most important thing.’ Hussein sent Clay’s hipflask spinning through the air.

Clay caught it and looked up at Hussein, decided not to ask.

Hussein lit another cigarette and exhaled a thick stream of smoke, leaned back against the side of the car. ‘Oh and there’s one more thing, Clay. The sheikh, the one you bribed, was found dead five days ago in Um’a’Lat. Shot in the head. You are wanted for his murder.’