The Abrupt Physics of Dying (3 page)

Before Abdulkader could start to translate, the man spoke in rapid terse English, looking straight at Clay. ‘If this is so,’ he said, ‘why does the company need the protection of soldiers?’

Clay opened his hands and held them palms up. ‘We have no protection,’ he said, ‘as you can see.’

‘Ah, but you are an oddity, my friend,’ Al Shams replied. ‘The Army is everywhere. Your Petro-Tex has been here for almost three years, and things only become worse.’

‘I can assure you that the company is committed to complying fully with all appropriate regulations …’ said Clay, reciting from the company’s public engagement handbook. It was what he was paid to do.

‘Do not patronise me, Mister Claymore. You know as well as I do that the regulations in Yemen are weak, ineffective and readily by-passed.’

Clay continued: ‘… and to comply with best industry practice wherever possible. Petro-Tex is committed to minimising the environmental and social impacts of its operations on the people of the Hadramawt.’

Al Shams blinked. The good eye flashed. The other disappeared behind a veil of wrinkled skin, its opaque depth reappearing only slowly as the mangled tissue drew back. Then he smiled. ‘You do not believe what you say, Mister Claymore. I can see this.’

Clay said nothing, sat listening to the empty echo of his own words.

‘The company,’ spat Al Shams. ‘Petro-Tex. You speak as if this thing were human, one of Allah’s creations. It is not. It is inanimate, soulless, not of this world. It exists for one purpose only, as we both know.’ He stamped the ground with his foot. ‘To get the oil that lies beneath this land. Our land. It will do anything to get it. It will pay people like you whatever it must to placate the villagers, to assuage the regulators. It will bribe, and kill. It exists only to enrich its shareholders. Such a thing as this is incapable of caring.’

‘I can assure you …’ Clay began, ‘… that the company …’

Al Shams raised his hand. Clay fell silent.

The Arab was quiet for a long time. Then he looked up and brought his good eye to bear on Clay. ‘My people are dying. Your oil is killing them. What you must ask yourself, Mister Claymore, is if you care.’

And in those few moments, as he looked around at the riot of trees shot from naked rock, he asked himself just this question, and determined that yes, he should care – and even vaguely remembered doing so once – but that, in fact, right now, and for a long time now, he felt nothing at all.

Clay shivered and closed his eyes. Then he pulled himself back and looked into the Arab’s eyes and said: ‘I don’t make the decisions.’

‘Ah yes, only following orders. So much of your history is like this, is it not? Your people have lost their way, my friend. They worship things other than God.’ Al Shams looked away for a moment as
if contemplating some deeper meaning. ‘But my question was not about power, Mister Claymore. I asked if you cared.’

Clay looked up. ‘What I think doesn’t matter,’ he said. That illusion had been dead a long time, buried somewhere in the Angolan bush.

Al Shams narrowed his good eye. The other remained fixed, staring out at some distant point beyond the canyon wall. ‘That is where you are wrong, Mister Claymore,’ he said. ‘And you are too young to be so wrong.’

Clay Straker took a deep breath. He didn’t feel young. ‘Look, Al Shams,’ he began, his voice tight. He cleared his throat, sought a deeper octave. ‘I may well be wrong. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things. But I can’t help you. You’ve got the wrong people.’

Al Shams pointed the stick at Clay’s chest, moved its charred tip slowly towards him, pushed it into the place where his heart was. ‘No, Mister Claymore, we have exactly the right people. And with you, both of you, we are going to send a message to Petro-Tex. One they cannot ignore.’ By now the gunmen had reappeared at the end of the ledge. Al Shams waved and they moved closer, levelling their weapons.

Clay pushed the stick away with his hand. ‘Whatever your issue with Petro-Tex, it’s got nothing to do with my driver. He has a family, sons. Let him go.’

Al Shams looked up at the thin blade of sky. He seemed to be searching the length of the precipice. ‘War is coming,’ he said. ‘Much will change,
inshallah
. The sky will tear, the tombs will bust open. Then you will know yourself. These are the words of God.’

Clay considered this for a moment. ‘I’ve seen those tombs,
broer
.’ He glanced up at ramparts of broken rock, back at the deformed face. ‘It’s not knowledge you find.’

Al Shams rose, wiped his hands one upon the other. ‘Without Allah’s wisdom, Mister Claymore, there is no knowledge. Now you will excuse me. Do not attempt to leave.’ Then he turned and strode towards the path that led down to the wadi floor.

The two gunmen moved aside to let Al Shams pass.

Clay scrambled to his feet. ‘You asked me if I cared,’ he called out. ‘Do you?’

Al Shams stopped.

‘Do you?’ Clay repeated, louder this time.

Al Shams turned and faced him.

‘What do you think, Mister Claymore?’

‘I think you speak well.’

The muscles on one side of Al Shams’ face contracted, forcing up one corner of his mouth, narrowing the good eye, brightening the skin of one cheek. But the mirror was flawed. Whether by birth or some horrible accident, the flesh of the other side remained slack and grey, unaffected by the brief spasm. The effect was hideous, destabilising. Al Shams looked down, up again. ‘I speak, Mister Claymore, for the innocent.’

‘Words.’

‘More than words, Mister Claymore. Truth.’

‘Truth, then: Abdulkader is innocent. Free him.’

Al Shams looked up to the sky. ‘It is in the hands of Allah,’ he said. And then he turned and disappeared into the green depths of the chasm.

You Should Pray

Night fell hard in the Empty Quarter. Clay shivered in his T-shirt and moved closer to the fire, trying not to think about the fleece jacket rolled up in his pack in the back of the Land Cruiser, and the bottle of whisky stashed under the front seat. It wasn’t that far away, beyond the rockslide, perhaps a kilometre up the canyon. He peered into the darkness. There was no sign of Al Shams’ men, just the first stars flickering in the deep blue trench of sky above.

Clay leaned in close to his friend, kept his voice to a whisper. ‘This is the man who killed Thierry Champard.’

Abdulkader shifted in his crouch, poked the fire, said nothing.

Clay knew better than to rush the Arab to words. He waited. The stars turned. After a while Clay said: ‘He’s not going to let us go.’

‘
Inshallah
, he will.’

‘God willing? No, Abdulkader. If we’re going to get out of here alive, we’ve got to do it ourselves.’

Abdulkader threw another log on the fire. It flared and caught. ‘Only Allah gives life. Only He takes it.
Allah akhbar.’

‘
Allah akhbar
,’ Clay repeated, a habit now after so many days in the desert with this man. God is great, the words engraved on the silver ring Abdulkader wore on his right index finger, his only adornment, his father’s prized possession.

Yes, perhaps God is. But Clay doubted it. He glanced over at Abdulkader, but his driver’s expression remained as immutable as the rock of the plateau, the dark andesite skin fissured by sun and thirst, head and jaw hidden behind the green-and-black
keffiyeh
of the Hadramawt, his eyes shielded beneath shocks of wiry grey hair.

‘The Land Cruiser isn’t far,’ he whispered.

Abdulkader rocked back on his heels, squat on his haunches, and poked the fire.

The rockslide was no more than twenty or thirty metres away, a few seconds at a sprint. Once inside its labyrinth they would be undetectable. They could pick the right moment, get to the car, and be gone before anyone had time to react. It was dark. There was no moon. He had seen only the two gunmen, the two who had hijacked them. There could be more farther down-wadi, but the darkness would give them a chance.

‘Al Shams has the key,’ said Abdulkader.

‘I can start it. I’d rather take my chances than wait here for Allah to decide.’ A violent surge of adrenaline shot through him, jerking him to his feet. ‘Let’s go.’

Abdulkader stretched out by the fire and cradled his head in his arm. ‘No. If we run, they will kill us. Sleep. Trust Allah.’

The old ghosts were here now. He drew out the plan in his head, assigned roles. ‘Get up, Abdulkader. It’s time to
ontrek
.’

But Abdulkader did not move. He stayed as he was, curled up by the fire; he looked up at Clay through narrowed eyes and did not look away for a long time. ‘You should pray,’ he said.

‘You’ve told me before.’ They had all done it back then, good Christian boys, in their holes with SWAPO raining down
kak
, believed with every part of themselves that they would be heard, spared. And the emptiness of it had been revealed in each shattered corpse he had pulled from the ground. Prayer was for the weak, the unscientific, the deluded. You had to believe in something. But not that.

He stood there for a long time watching the firelight dance on the overhanging rock. Like Africa, the rocks here, the sky, the rolling expanses, these green intrusions forced up through cracks in the Earth’s concrete. Thirteen years wound back and Eben was there,
swimming in the river, smiling and waving from the deepest part where the water was dark and cold, his limbs pale, moving ghostly in the tannin-brown Cunene water, Clay on the bankside watching for crocodiles, R4 assault rifle at the ready. So long ago now, only days before that last mission into Angola, Operation Protea the generals had called it, after which everything changed and nothing was ever the same again.

Clay forced a laugh, coughed, looked across the fire at Abdulkader. The man’s stoic fatalism – that granitic belief in a higher power – was something he had never understood. Empirically, it made no sense. Observation denied it. And yet envy flooded through him now, raw, thirsty, an insatiable dark negative that seemed to pull in everything around him, leaving him standing alone and naked, the last torn strips of his logic hanging like rags from his frame.

‘The accident,’ said Clay, throwing his voice out into the void. ‘Who pulled me out?’

Abdulkader looked up at him a moment, his face painted orange by the firelight, then lowered his eyes.

‘You did, Abdulkader.’

The Arab looked up again, said nothing.

‘It wasn’t God.’

‘It was his hand.’

‘No, Abdulkader. It was you. You decided. You saved my life. This is exactly the same.’

‘No man decides, Mister Clay. Only Allah. You must give yourself.’

Clay turned and walked towards the ledge. Away from the fire the cold came quickly. He looked over the precipice, down to the darkness of the wadi floor. The rockslide was there, its patchwork of jumbled surfaces just visible in the starlight. The gunmen were gone. There didn’t appear to be anyone between them and the slide. He turned and faced Abdulkader, ready to try one more time. But his friend’s body rose and fell in untroubled sleep – he had prayed with the sunset, and now he was ready for whatever would come.

Clay moved closer to the dying fire, sat. Loneliness came. He tried to recall the vestiges of the Lord’s Prayer, dredging deep harbours of memory, but the words that came made him shudder, a hypocrite calling to the heavens. It was Allah, apparently, and not JC, who would decide.

He closed his eyes.

Soon, the dreams came. Thirst always made them worse.

Later, how much later he did not know, he woke with a start. The fire had died. His shirt was soaked. His heart hammered in his chest. Axe blades of pain slammed into his head. He pushed himself up, shivered in the cold. Abdulkader was there, cocooned in sleep, his breathing lapping the rockface like water. Clay looked at his watch, up to the sky, dawn still a few hours off. He opened his eyes wide, breathed the cold air, felt it flow deep into his lungs. He held it there as the doctor had shown him, exhaled, breathed in again, tried to fight back the remnant shards of his sleeping hallucinations. But this was their time, and they were determined. Faces came, hovered there in the darkness before him, sounds, the burnt edges of landscapes, gaping wounds pulsing, though his eyes were open, voices and smiles of those long dead breaking the banks of his consciousness, flooding his senses. He opened his eyes wide, focussed on his breathing, reached for the woodpile. His hand closed around a gnarled bone of camelthorn. He raked the stick through the ash, uncovered a few remaining coals, beacons in the darkness. He got to his knees, bent his head to the ash as if in prayer, blowing up a lonely flame. It flickered and died, was reborn in a rush of oxygen. He cupped his hands around it, felt its far-off warmth, urged it to life. He peeled a strip of bark from the twig, touched it to the flame. It flared and caught. Another. Soon the fire was going and the dreams were gone.

Clay sat close, tried to warm himself. He gazed into the flames, watched the chain reaction build, gases mixing and igniting, impurities bleeding in colour. He fed the fire and watched the sky lighten.

Stars vanished.

A hint of colour refracted along the dark edge of the canyon wall, day finally coming.

Soon, the heat would come, crushing everything.

Clay rose to his feet, joints stiff, ran his tongue over the dry skull of his mouth.

Abdulkader looked up at him. ‘Again, you did not sleep,’ he said.

‘I was praying,’ Clay said.

Abdulkader frowned.

‘Sabah al khaeer
,’ came a voice from the darkness. Al Shams stood in the gloom at the far end of the cave, hands clasped before him. ‘Good morning,’ he said. He was alone.

Abdulkader rose and inclined his head.

Al Shams moved closer, emerged from the shadows. ‘I sense you are an intelligent and honourable man, Mister Claymore. So I ask for your help.’

Clay stepped forward. He was within four paces of Al Shams now, towered over him. He could take him down in one surge, push him over the ledge. You’ve got it wrong, he thought. I’m neither. That was what war had taught him, made of him. He said nothing.

‘This you will do for us, Mister Claymore. Go to Um’alat, speak with the
mashayikh
, the sheikh there. Go also to Al Urush and Al Bawazir. There is evil being done in these places. Desecrations I do not comprehend, corruptions of nature. Perhaps you can understand them, with your science. See for yourself what your oil company is doing. And then deliver this message to your infidel masters: all that is within this land is a gift from God to those that have lived here since before the Prophet. It is twice blasphemy: to deny them a share in this wealth, and to harm them in its taking. When you have done this and learned the truth, find me. Without this knowledge, our people cannot protect themselves. Now go in peace, Mister Claymore.’

Clay reached out for the cavern wall, steadied himself. The sandstone was cool and damp, like sandpaper, the silica studs hard, reassuring.

Al Shams stepped forward and put his hand on Clay’s forearm. ‘I am giving you an opportunity, my friend, to find what you have lost.’

His gaze cut into Clay’s eyes. The asymmetry was painful. He had lost a lot of things, was pissed that it was so obvious to this man.

‘Remember always that God is great.’

Clay looked away, down at the dust of centuries. Evidence for this would be good. Again, he said nothing.

Al Shams removed his hand. ‘And no, we are not responsible for the unfortunate death of your Monsieur Champard.’

Clay took a step back, glanced over at Abdulkader.

‘Be serene, Mister Claymore, in the knowledge that there will be a
yawm’idin
, a day of reckoning, for us all.’ Al Shams raised his hand and the two gunmen appeared from the far end of the ledge – the same two gunmen from the day before. The older man, the one with the hennaed beard, placed something in Al Shams’ hand. ‘You may go,’ said Al Shams, dropping the Toyota’s keys into Clay’s
outstretched
palm. ‘But your friend will remain as our guest.’