The Abrupt Physics of Dying (28 page)

Al Shams sat unmoving, staring at the sketch before him, silent. After a while he looked up at Clay, nodded, and called out. An assistant came to his side, the same man as before. Al Shams whispered into his ear and then he left. ‘Now do you see, Mister Claymore, why I needed you here, doing this work? Many lives are at stake. What more do you need to tell the full story, to prove this hypothesis, to link this horror to Petro-Tex without doubt?’

Clay looked over at Rania. ‘We need samples and readings from the CPF evaporation ponds, and from the wadi just below the CPF.’ He indicated each place on the sketch map with the point of his pencil. ‘Then we can establish chemical evolution from source to receptors, connecting Petro-Tex with the deaths in Al Urush. Definitive proof.’

‘That is what we call them,’ said Rania. ‘Receptors. That is all they are, these people. Even the language conspires.’

Clay closed his eyes a moment, continued. ‘It’s over two hundred kilometres by road to the CPF. There will be road blocks.’ He looked up at Rania. ‘If I can get to the top of the tributary wadi just to the east of the CPF, I can get through the fence down by the old Bedou well, be into the CPF by nightfall, and get to Al Urush down the wadi on foot, be there by morning. All I need is two more days.’

Al Shams nodded.

‘And then we will have a story to tell,’ said Rania.

‘Ah yes, Mademoiselle LaTour. I have seen your work. Very professional. Very balanced. But does our small struggle warrant the attention of such an important international news agency?’

‘That is why I am here. A private interview is all I ask. The world needs to know what is happening here.’ She said it in Arabic.

Al Shams sat gazing at Rania for a long time. ‘You speak well, young lady. Most of my countrymen cannot speak God’s own language so beautifully.’ He was clearly impressed, and not only by the beauty of her speech.

Rania smiled. Clay knew that she was where she needed to be, where she should be.

Al Shams turned to Clay. ‘If you would do this for us, Mister Claymore, collect this information, we would be grateful until the end of days. And to do this, you will need a dependable guide.’ He waved his hand. A side door opened.

A scowling Yemeni stood in the gloom. He was pale and thin, in a dirty
thaub
and a loose headscarf. Al Shams waved him closer. The man shuffled forwards, head bowed, stood before them with hands crossed. He looked up, grey eyebrows crimped under the headscarf so that his eyes were almost completely obscured.

‘Allah has been merciful,’ he said in a rock-and-cobble baritone that made Clay jump.

Clay stood and faced the man, looked into his eyes, pulse racing now. He reached for the man’s weathered hand, took it in his. And there it was, the white mark on the index finger where the ring had shielded his skin from the Arabian sun ever since his father’s death.

Clay threw his arms around Abdulkader and held him like a brother, hiding his face in his friend’s headscarf, relief scouring away days of guilt. Abdulkader stood rigid and unmoving, arms at his sides. Clay composed himself, pushed himself back and held Abdulkader at arm’s length, pored over him. It was really him, crags and frowns and all. Rania smiled up at them with that big beautiful mouth.

‘I’m sorry, Mister Clay,’ Abdulkader said.

‘What do you mean sorry? Jesus, no, Abdulkader, it’s me who’s sorry.’

Al Shams waved his arm in a slow arc over them. ‘Mister
Claymore
, Abdulkader my friend, you will leave for the CPF in the morning. Please leave us now. Miss LaTour, you shall have your interview.’

Flirting with Extinction

That evening Clay was moved to a small stone building near the top of the settlement, not far from where he had met with Al Shams. Inside was a small table and two chairs, a hand-woven rug thrown over the packed dirt floor, and a wood-frame bed with a straw-filled mattress. A kerosene lamp hung from one of the ceiling beams. Two small wood shuttered openings at the front of the building looked out across the wadi and down to the coastal plain. A low back door led out onto a small courtyard ringed with stone walls. A pomegranate tree grew in one corner, well-tended, heavy with ripening fruit.

The guards were gone. Clay moved a chair into the courtyard and sat watching the sky fade as he picked small red seeds from fleshy yellow husk. It had been hours now since he had seen Rania or Abdulkader. After leaving Al Shams, the guards had taken Abdulkader away and escorted Clay here. It was made clear that he was not to leave the building.

He crunched a mouthful of the tart seeds, his fingertips red from the juice. The shock of finding the first traces of contamination so far off-trend, over a hundred kilometres from Wadi Urush, was still with him. Where would these people find water? Perhaps they could try to dig a well further up-wadi; the further north, the lower the probability of contamination. He must tell Al Shams the next time he saw him. He thought back to their conversation. What had Al Shams meant calling Abdulkader ‘my friend’? He had done so without a trace of artifice, his tone completely genuine. Had Abdulkader succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome, falling in with the
common cause? Clay’s mind raced, the sky now sea blue, the first stars tentative above the darkening rock walls.

He rummaged in his backpack for the bottle of whisky, but it had been taken. The hip flask had been spared, though, and he unscrewed the cap and let the cheap duty-free blend flow into his throat. He took a deep breath, looked up at the stars. He was going to finish the job, collect the vital source data. Then Rania would write the story and perhaps something would change. And then what? Already labelled a terrorist, a wanted man, he would now be the prime suspect in Hussein’s death as well. He could only assume that his new identity would not protect him – it would have been registered with the PSO when Hussein secured it. He took another swig of the whisky, but there was no deadening of the fear that grew within him like a cancer.

He walked to the door, opened it. There were no guards, just the wadi spreading dark and deep below. Now he knew why. An outsider in a country riven by war, without money, the nearest border a thousand kilometres away through some of the driest, most inhospitable and rugged terrain on the planet – there was nowhere to go.

The sky was dark now and a breath of hot wind flowed across the village. Clay raised his face to the stir of air and emptied the last of the whisky into his mouth, suddenly feeling very tired, aware of the crease of pain across the back of his head. It felt like days since he had slept. He ducked under the doorway, fashioned a pillow from the jacket Hussein had given him, stretched out on the mattress and closed his eyes.

He had just fallen into a furtive sleep when there was a knock at the door. He rose and swung open the crude planking. Rania stood in the dust looking up at him from behind the narrow opening of a drawn veil. ‘Please, Claymore,’ she whispered. ‘I must speak with you.’ There was urgency in her voice.

Clay stood aside and closed the door behind her. It was dark inside now, too dark to see her face. He grabbed the other chair and led her out into the back courtyard where the rising moon bathed
the small enclosure in quicksilver light. She walked the perimeter of the courtyard, peering over the walls of hand-laid unmortared stone, and then sat facing him.

‘Did they go through your bag?’ she asked in a whisper.

‘They took my bottle.’

‘But you have a reserve. I can smell it.’ She smiled, just a flick of her lip.

He pulled out the empty hip flask, pinged its side with his fingernail.

She looked down at her clasped hands. ‘They took my case.’ She looked up at him, took a breath, parted her lips as if to speak, then closed her mouth again and curled back into the chair. She was quiet for a long time.

After a while he leant in towards her and said: ‘What is it, Rania?’

She hesitated a moment, seemed to collect herself. ‘Is what Hussein said true? Did you bribe that sheikh, Clay? Did you mislead those poor, unfortunate people?’ There was effort in her voice, as if she was forcing the words out, one at a time.

Clay stared hard into her eyes. After a while he said: ‘Don’t look so surprised, Rania.’

Rania opened her mouth, held back a gasp. ‘Please, do not say that.’

‘What did you expect?’

‘Clay, I know …’

He cut her short. ‘No, you don’t. So don’t say it, Rania. Don’t even think it.’

‘I know enough.’

He pushed his hands hard into the chair frame. ‘You think so?’ he said. ‘This,’ he looked around the stone walled courtyard, ‘this is nothing, just one project. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I don’t even know how many people I’ve screwed over.’ He slumped back in the chair and looked out into the night. ‘It hasn’t turned out like I wanted.’ Not even close.

‘What happened, Clay? Tell me.’

‘I would rather not,’ he lied.

She leaned over in the darkness and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Please,
chéri
.’

He told her everything. Almost. He told her about the money they paid him and his need for it, about the falsified reports and bribes, here and in other places, desolate places where the law was no more than a veneer, a rumour, where anyone could be bought and anything could be done. And the more he told her the more he wanted to tell, to rid himself of it, and before she could answer or question or react he spoke of all of the other jobs, the other bribes, so many that he could no longer remember the faces or the amounts or even the reasons, and of all the ruined places, the bulldozed marshes and the dredged reefs, the displaced people, and of the parts that he tried never to think about, how he lied and deceived the poorest and most vulnerable, how he had been doing it for a long time, ever since the war killed the person he was and replaced him with someone he despised. He could not stop. It poured out like venom, black and ugly, and as he spoke he felt the inevitability of her reproach crush him like a hundred million years of rock, an epoch.

And even then he kept back the worst, the part that he had almost managed to convince himself had never really happened, the part that now only came to him at night, in the hallucinations of
nightmare
, the part that even the SADF had expunged from the record.

She listened in silence and pondered for a long time after he finished. She had pulled back her headscarf and let down her hair. She reached for his hand, took it in hers. ‘The war did this to you.’

He breathed her in. That’s exactly what the court-appointed doctor had told him in London, after he’d pronounced his diagnosis. A disease, he called it, like any other, like malaria or dengue. Something that infects you, that comes on when you least expect it, something you’re just going to have to learn to live with. No one
wants
to get sick, he said. It’s not your fault. God, how he wished it could be true.

‘You are
good
, Claymore Straker.’

Clay said nothing. How to respond to this?

‘And I am sorry for how I treated you in Sana’a.’

‘I’ve never been treated better,’ he said.

Her eyes fluttered, closed, opened. She directed their full glory at him. ‘I never imagined, Clay. It was overwhelming. As if I was losing myself. That morning you left, I was so confused. I was frightened. I
am
frightened.’ Rania pulled up her feet and curled into the chair, knees clasped to her chest, and sat looking out into the darkness for a long time, saying nothing.

When she finally spoke her tone was deliberate and soft, like that time out on the coast in Aden. ‘Sometimes you do not have a choice, Clay. No matter how much you might wish you did. Sometimes it is simply not up to you.’

This was not what he had expected from her.

‘And now it is too late,’ she said, only a whisper.

He waited for her to continue, but she just sat, mute, staring into the night.

‘What do you mean? Too late for what?’

‘For everything. All the things I thought I would do.’

‘It’s never too late, Rania.’ She was teaching him this.

She leaned in close. He could feel the warmth of her skin, the caress of her breath on his neck. ‘Do you believe that, Clay?’

‘Sometimes.’

She sat back in her chair, drew up her knees, wrapped her arms around herself, hid her face.

After a while he said: ‘What happened with Al Shams, Rania? Your interview.’

She looked up at him. ‘You were right.’

‘He’s not Al Qaeda.’

‘Or Ansar Al-Sharia, or Islamic Jihad,’ she said. ‘No more than you are.’

Clay forced what he hoped would be a quick smile.

‘Will you get the rest of the data you need?’ she asked.

‘I’m going to do my best, Rania.’

‘You must, Clay. No matter what happens, you must get the proof, and make sure the story is told. It is the only way to protect these people and clear yourself. Promise me.’

She was right. He needed the remaining data as much as Al Shams did. Needed it for a lot of reasons. He reached out for her, found her hand. ‘I’ll get the data, Rania, if you write the story. We’ll do this together.’

She reached under the fold of her robe and pulled out a sheaf of loose-leaf pages. ‘I already have.’ She thrust them towards him. ‘Here.’

Clay took the pages, looked down at the tight disciplined script in the sombre light, scanned the first few paragraphs. ‘Who killed the
mashayikh
?’ he asked.

‘Al Shams claimed responsibility. But I think he’s covering for someone. It was an honour killing. Once they found he was taking bribes …’ she hesitated. ‘From you.’

‘Jesus.’

‘He likes you Clay. He knows you have helped him. He says he sees something in you.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘But he is determined, convinced of his cause. Be very careful.’ She stood and took his hand. ‘Come, there is not much time.’

She closed the door and the window shutters, turned down the lantern, lit the candle on the bedside table, and sat on the bed. He sat next to her and gazed at the small flame that flirted with its own extinction at the tip of the wick. She was crying now, silently, weeping thick salty tears into her hands. He put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her on the cheek and the ear and the neck. Her tears smelt of rain on the red soil of the
veldt
when he was a kid. It didn’t matter, he told her. It was going to be alright. But he didn’t say the things he should have said, about how glad he was that she was here with him now, and how he admired her courage and the way she refused to compromise her ideals. At least they had tried, he said. They had come here and they were going to do what they could.

After a while she wiped her face on her sleeve and stood before him. He looked up at her, the candlelight flickering across her face. Was it for the murdered, this offering of tears? Was it for the polluted waters that sickened her as if the poisons flowed through her own veins? She looked into his eyes for a long time and then without a word she reached into her robe and pulled out her pistol and laid it on the floor. He was about to speak when she touched her fingertip to his lips. ‘They did not search me,’ she whispered. Then she reached behind her back and let her dress fall to the ground. She stood naked before him.

‘Please,’ she whispered, ‘I do not want to be alone tonight.’

He pulled her to him. They fell to the bed, mouths locked. She raised her arms above her head, palms open, up. He kissed the salty ridge of her cheekbone, pinning her hands with his own. She closed her eyes. He kissed her cheek and the tip of her nose and the curved cartilage of her ear. She sighed and arched her back. He wrestled off his shirt and threw it to the floor. Her legs enveloped him. The air around him was afire with swirling chemicals, and it was if they were alone in the universe, locked in some furious elemental communication, apart from the chaos of the world; for those few moments they spun in harmony, and when he came inside her it was as if something were being wrenched from within his core, drawn out like un-distilled poison.

Afterwards, he fell into a cloud of sleep. He awoke sometime later and watched her sleeping under the blanket in the half-moon’s reflected light until he could no longer resist waking her. She pulled his mouth to hers and the touch and the smell of her inflamed him and he took her by the hips and turned her over and pulled her up onto her knees. She tilted her pelvis and buried her sighs in the pillow.

Later he awoke to the distant sound of gunfire. For a long time he lay holding her, listening to the whispers of the warm breeze that flowed down from the plateau across the plain to the ocean. Her head was resting on his clavicle, hair splayed across his chest. Her
warmth filled the bed. He ran his hand over the soft curve of her hip. ‘Are you awake?’ he said.