Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals Read online

  ‘Right. I believe they are already familiar with that technology in the Balkans.’

  ‘And we’re going to take the van and fill it with provisions, for people, refugees, and also, we’re going to – we have a play to bring a message,’ I said.

  ‘Oh good!’

  ‘But it won’t be a one-way exchange. We’ll also be there to listen,’ said Simon, concerned, presumably, that Kenneth’s objection was to any element of neo-imperialist condescension about the mission.

  ‘Look. I am not letting my daughter drive into a civil war. I saw a man’s hand get torn off by a drilling rig in Shetland. I’ve been to Islamabad, it’s a shithole. My father was at Monte Cassino. I know all about this. I know a man who knows a lot more about this. I’m actually doing something on this, the firm is. I’ve been to Belgrade. In the seventies. So, no. All right? It’s just a no, so will you please go upstairs and tell her that she will not be going.’

  Chapter 2

  THE TOP PART of the house was given over to Penny and Von. I reckoned that far under the sofas of the ‘playroom’ where our little mourning party gathered bits of Lego might still lie about. There was, after all, still one Babar the Elephant poster up on the wall. But in recent years the carpet had got pocked with little black burns where hot nibblets of hash had dropped from joints. Von, behind a pair of record decks, nodded his head out of rhythm with the music. Periodically he slid the cross-fader to bump two deep-house tracks seamfully into one another, looked up, bit his lip, and gave a little yeah-baby-I’m-on-it nod to the room.

  Once Penny had got us all assembled – a mix of her London friends and some of the Peace Play Partnership – she retreated with Cally to her bedroom, visiting the playroom only periodically to smile at the pity of it all.

  Sitting cross-legged by the wall, I wondered if maybe now I wasn’t going to Bosnia? That would be a shame. I mean, mainly I liked the idea of going. I wasn’t so sure about actually going. In a way I still didn’t really believe we would actually go. Not us, physically. Though I did feel strongly that something should be done.

  Most particularly, I felt this in relation to the fact that Helen hadn’t been reading the papers or watching the news when it started happening. I was watching a lot of everything and I used to beat her over the head with it when she was groggy. ‘We need to do something!’ I’d say, and show her pictures of dead children when she sat quivering and pale, sipping at tea, dipping her lips like a fragile blue tit at the rim of one of our thick-sided mugs. At that time, I dare say, I had one of the most coherent foreign policies of anyone working on a building site in the Manchester area. I read the incoming reports with indignation. I had my favourites in the commentariat and on the world diplomatic scene, people who I thought of in some ways as my emissaries. It certainly made the news more exciting to have certain diplomats and particular ethnicities to root for.

  Helen said I was overly emotional about it. She accused me during one row of having no inner resources – as though other people might be able to go off to the bathroom and dig some iron ore or diamonds out of their belly buttons. It’s true I did like very much to be on the right side. And as an only child maybe I had grown up a bit milky and overly loved.

  On her next progress through the room, Penny lingered a while and slid her back down the wall next to me. Her long legs, burnished with a patina of expensive oil or sheer good health, crooked up from her skirt and I looked over at Simon, twitchy, comically distant, two metres away on a beanbag.

  ‘And guess what. To fucking cap it, they’ve said they won’t put my play in the drama festival because of a stupid – thing.’

  ‘Oh, shit, Pen. What thing?’

  ‘A date thing. They got it late, the date was late. Because I’ve graduated. I sent it a bit late.’

  ‘Oh. Right. God.’

  ‘I feel – I feel almost censored.’ I winced. She spotted it and winced too. ‘I mean, I know that’s disgusting when you think of real repression.’

  ‘Yeah. But . . .’ I said and couldn’t think of anything more to offer.

  ‘I should shut up.’

  ‘No. Not at all.’

  ‘The only effective censorship in late-capitalist nations is self-censorship.’

  I agreed, strongly.

  ‘But that’s what I want to write. I want to write something – about all the things we don’t even dare to think?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I know,’ I said. ‘What are they?’

  ‘. . . I don’t know,’ she said and laughed.

  I tried to think of something else true or real to say, but as I went grubbing around my consciousness I found myself barren. In fact, I wasn’t sure I was even quite important enough to have a consciousness. Not a whole one. At least not yet, not a serious one. My feeling is, I’ll think about that later – who I am. Internal conflicts, moral battles, soul quivers, deep depressions, raving happiness – they are all, like smart restaurants and Grand Prix racing, artichokes and the visual arts, not really for me.

  ‘So what did my dad say, when I was gone?’ Penny asked.

  ‘It was tough. Me and Simon did our best.’

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘He’s a very determined person and it’s easy to see how you could –’ I flicked my eyes to Simon – ‘crumble, but I think we – I – managed to keep up a pretty good front. I gave him the highlights, the social and economic and military sort of stuff and what our hopes and aims are, and I just tried to face the guy down. For what it’s worth. God help me.’

  ‘Look. Your old man’s just a twat,’ Simon said as he sat and joined us. For a moment there was a bristle. Then Penny looked at him and said, ‘You know, he is a twat.’

  ‘No. Yeah. Exactly. He is a bloody twat,’ I said, with all the bravery of the guy who jostles out of the crowd to additionally knife the already dead dictator.

  ‘Fuck it. I am going, now, to tell him. It is happening,’ she said and gave a nod to Simon.

  The problem with Simon, from my point of view, was that he was essentially me, only better. Any margin I could gain by playing up for Penny the exoticism of my normality was trumped by his. Simon was slim and aggressively Geordie – his family had actually been touched by the miners’ strike. He had an omnivorous, serially monogamous intellect, becoming a fascinated expert in topic after topic: poetry, string theory, close-up magic, hypnosis, Middle Eastern cookery. He was, unfortunately, very interesting. He smoked roll-ups and sat around looking like he was thinking about things and, I felt, fucking up my chances of sticking around. I was pretty sure, after all, that metropolitan London accepted outsiders into the mix only drop by oily drop; not too many at once in case the mayonnaise might curdle.

  Cally joined us as we headed down the creaky stairs. She was a great beauty, I suppose. Her face made up of protracted planes of flawless skin, stretched like canvas from her sharp cheekbones down to her chin. She clopped down the stairs at the rear like a happy heedless horse. The four of us arrived at the bedroom door. As in a farce, I felt the Calmans would surely be doing it doggy-style in bed, red-faced, when our deputation entered, but no. Kenneth was frowning, reading P. J. O’Rourke, and Mrs Calman Wild Swans.

  ‘Hello. What the hell is this?’

  ‘Dad, I am going. All right? That’s what I’ve come to say. Bob is driving the minibus and we’re going to Bosnia to stop that war.’ We looked at her parents, old and corrupt in bed. Penny’s face was set with determination, but as her words hung in the air she gave me the briefest glance and rolled her eyes, biting her lip at what she’d found herself saying. ‘Doing whatever we can to stop the war.’

  ‘Did you tell her?’ Kenneth asked me and Simon, who both looked at the floor. ‘I’ve seen a hand come off.’

  ‘You’ve told me about the hand, Dad.’

  ‘Once you’ve seen a hand come off, on the floor, and yes, now they could sew it back on, but – the human body is fragile. There are horrible things.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Penny said.
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  ‘The genie is out of the bottle. They need to see sense. It’s dog eat dog out there. And it’s right, none of those dogs is our dog.’

  ‘So we let them eat each other, alive? The Serbs against the Muslims? It’s not a dogfight. One of the dogs is a cat.’

  ‘It’s true, Mr Calman, it’s really, more like a dog versus a cat, versus a chicken. Where the Serbs are –’ I started, always eager to explain.

  ‘It is not our business.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Calman, but if it’s not our business, then whose business is it?’ Kenneth looked at me. ‘For – whither the human man – if we do not – aid our brothers in peril?’

  There was a pause, during which people perhaps considered how wise I was.

  ‘Where are you going to stay?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Shannon knows people.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Sarajevo.’

  ‘Oh Jesus Christ,’ said Kenneth.

  ‘We’ll just be using it as a base, taking my play to hot spots, to defuse things.’

  ‘Oh, perfect, brilliant. Yes – go to the hot spots! This is a war, Penelope, a war.’

  At that moment I followed Penny’s eye to her father’s clothes hanging over the back of a chair by the dresser. Poking out from inside his trousers were his crumpled pale blue underpants, the fabric worn a little thin, and the pathos of these creased man-pants seemed to undermine everything he said. Of course a man of such pants, with his sagging chest and his fuzz of grey hair curling out from the V of his pyjama top, would be scared.

  Penny ended the interview by stating, ‘I have a passport, I’m twenty-three years old. I can do whatever I want.’ And then added, not entirely truthfully, ‘We don’t need your money. So I’m sorry if you’re not going to support this, but we are leaving tomorrow.’

  Chapter 3

  ‘WHERE ARE YOU going, mate?’

  Simon and I were billeted together that night in what the family referred to as ‘Patty’s Crap Room’, on account of the large amount of crap that had been left in there by Patty, a departed au pair. There was a wide single bed and a two-seater sofa not long enough to sleep on. It was not made clear by Penny or anyone really what was expected in terms of our sleeping arrangements. My sense was that the family felt coming from the Welsh borders and Newcastle, from families of innkeepers and teachers, miners and so on, that Simon and I would probably be fine, somehow, in there, and there wasn’t too much need for enquiry or direction. We’d agreed to share the bed and it had taken me some time to drop off. But now I’d jerked back alive.

  ‘What?’ Simon asked, easing the door open.

  ‘Where are you going, mate?’ I said again.

  ‘Nowhere, mate.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I’m just going for a leak.’

  ‘Oh . . . did you not see? There’s one in there. En suite.’

  ‘. . . I’m actually going to see if Penny’s OK, after everything. OK?’

  ‘Oh . . . Shall I come?’ I said.

  ‘You’re tired, get some rest.’

  ‘OK. And . . . do you think you should – disturb her?’ He didn’t even think he had to reply to that and he began to push the door closed. ‘Tell her I hope she’s OK, from me!’

  ‘Will do, pal!’ Simon said softly, through the last disappearing crack.

  Yes. That was going to be high on his list of priorities.

  I tracked his steps until they disappeared out of range, and then – could I hear the knock? Could I hear the door crack? Was that the murmur of conversation? Or was it just the hiss of my ears listening in on themselves? Lying there, my monitoring felt effortful enough to burn calories, as if my hearing was now so sensitised that a pan dropped on a tile floor would blow my eardrums.

  As the seconds he was absent became a minute, I began to investigate the new reality: Simon and Penny. The poet and the playwright. Two fresh graduates, magnetically pulled together. And as the minute turned into an unbelievable three, I thought I might be within my rights to simply march down and ask what the hell was going on? Then as three hit five, I started writing a bitter rant in my head, to be biroed out and left for her on the bed, full of nasty one-syllable words, criticism and emotional indignation.

  I lived in that sour little pocket for quite a while. But then as seven minutes turned into eight, nine – I mellowed. This was the middle age of my despair and the passion of the three-minute hothead waned. Now I was sitting, like Old Father Time, knowing that ten and eleven and twelve minutes would all come and I would sit, grey-bearded on this rock, watching them all pass and smile at the passions of the human heart. I would leave no note, of course I wouldn’t – too wise for that. I would just eat my toast in the morning, go to Bosnia with the gang, and be a simple soul, bandaging the feet of children, warriors, whosoever as might come to me, eating a little bread and soup in my simple dwelling – and if Simon was perchance shot in the head or nuts, I would be waiting. And when she came to me I would say, ‘We had our moment, Penelope, ’tis passed now. I am happy with my book and my good soup.’

  In fact, as I lay there, arms around the pillow, both ears doing their hard labour, I was aware that a part of me was willing my rival on. My heart beat so hard that to deny it the drama of defeat would be a little mean.

  I imagined I would certainly be up all night. I took out my fat, battered copy of War and Peace and looked at the cover illustration of a grand ball. It would be impossible to sleep. And staying awake was necessary too: it would be rude to miss an appointment with my torturer when he returned. I was turning over whether I would bother to feign disinterest in the affair or allow myself to be frankly fascinated, when I dissolved into dreams of triumph and disaster during which my bed-mate returned scores of times with faces that morphed from dream to nightmare to primary-school teacher, landing up hard and cold at seven in the worst of all scenarios: he still wasn’t back. Nothing has ever been quite so empty to me as Simon’s half of the bed when I woke. No Cossack wife waving off a husband to Borodino ever missed her bed-mate half as much as I did then.

  I sat up, and after considering and rejecting the idea of listening to my Serbo-Croat tapes on my Walkman, headed down to the little kitchenette on the floor below, where I toasted a heel of whitening wholemeal, leaving the untouched loaf fresh in its bag. The kettle boiled and in came the cleaner. She smiled and started to pull things out of the washing machine in a ropey-tangle. I hummed a little and turned to yesterday’s paper on the countertop to mute the silence between us.

  ‘You see that?’ she asked. ‘The girl?’

  I smiled at her, which wasn’t right apparently.

  ‘The little girl who stab her mother?’ she said and pointed to a story in the paper.

  Now it clicked: the horrible and very popular trial of a child who’d murdered a parent. ‘Who could do this?’ she asked and I shook my head grimly. Indeed. Who? ‘Who?’ she said again. I shook my head for all the pity in the world.

  ‘A stab in the eye. Who could do that?’

  Yes, the eye was definitely particularly bad; I really didn’t know who could do it. Yet the cleaner was still looking to me as if I did but was unwilling to admit the answer.

  ‘Who could do that?’ I offered back in a move I thought might end the enquiry.

  ‘She stabbed with scissors in the eye and then – all over.’

  I really didn’t see where to go other than further head shaking.

  ‘The mother is asleep and she stabs with scissors? Jesus Christ. Scissors. In the eye?’

  ‘I mean, who knows what the child must have gone through – to end up able to do such a thing,’ I said, finally, in my surprising new role as counsel for the defence in the case of Good versus Evil.

  ‘Jesus Christ! She is stabbed forty-three times all over!’ she said, and Penny entered, passing the cleaner without a word as I seized up like something clockwork left to rust in the rain.

  ‘Morning,’ I said, trying to figure out how you gener
ally look at someone.

  ‘Morning,’ she said and smiled and I began to plan, based on the smile, how we might have an affair behind Simon’s back.

  ‘I spoke to Shannon, about last night,’ Penny said. ‘I called her – Simon suggested it. She said, what she said was quite right actually. . .’

  ‘Oh, OK?’

  ‘. . . which was, no one wants us to go. No one. But we are going to go. I mean, like Simon said, Laurie Lee walked over the Pyrenees to get to the Spanish Civil War. I mean, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘A lot of people don’t want this play to happen. Which strongly suggests that it really needs to happen.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I mean, not everything that someone wants not to happen needs to happen – but yeah.’

  ‘No, yeah,’ I conceded.

  ‘I mean, why do you want to go, Andrew, apart from your dad’s heritage and everything?’ She leaned back on the counter as the cleaner departed.

  ‘Me? Well, I just feel, as I think I’ve said before, that 1936, 1939, sometimes there comes a point, a moment, when you have to decide which side you’re on. 1968,’ I said, and then, ‘1976,’ not entirely sure what precisely I was referring to, but confident there had been things to be for and against that year.

  ‘No, I’ve been up all night and I just think, it’s important to know why you’re doing something.’

  I nodded in agreement, my lip caught between my teeth. I eyed the sharp knives on the draining board and wondered which one of them I would use to cut my finger off if someone offered me a trade of one digit in return for the certainty that last night had been chaste between Penny and Simon.

  ‘It’s what I feel, Penny. It’s what I feel. And – Simon, Simon, he helped you – through it last night? And . . . so on?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she said.

  ‘That’s nice. That’s a nice thing.’

  ‘Yeah. Good. So we’re going, yes?’

  ‘We ride at dawn. Fuck it, let’s do it!’

  ‘Great, well, Shannon’s going to meet us with the van.’