The Last Kestrel

The throb of an approaching truck interrupted him. He looked towards the window, nodded to Jalil and, in the doorway, pushed his bare feet back into the sandals waiting there. Ellen sipped her scalding tea and listened to the slam of a truck door outside, then low voices.

The man who entered with him smiled round. He had a short beard and a brown Afghan hat and greeted them with easy confidence. Ellen sat up, interested, to watch. My cousin, said the schoolteacher, and clicked his fingers to his son to run for a fresh chai glass. Just a few minutes later, before the conversation had really resumed, Jalil got to his feet, thanked the schoolteacher and ushered Ellen hastily out of the house.

‘That was abrupt.’ Ellen watched the passing landscape with dismay from the back seat of the vehicle. They’d spent several hours driving out to find the schoolteacher and she’d left with barely half an interview. ‘What’s the hurry?’

Jalil was sitting in the front passenger seat by the driver. He mumbled something she didn’t catch.

‘He had more to say,’ she went on. The late morning sun was intense. Her head, encased in a headscarf, was already hot. ‘We didn’t have to leave just because his cousin came.’

‘That man he calls his cousin,’ Jalil turned back to her and lowered his voice, ‘he is not a good man.’

Ellen shook her head. ‘Why do you say that?’

Jalil raised his hand and worked it open and closed like the mouth of a glove puppet. ‘Blah blah,’ he said, snapping his thumb against his fingers. ‘He is a man to go blah blah blah to someone. To some powerful man. He came rushing to see us for a reason.’ He stared at Ellen. His voice had dropped to a whisper. ‘Maybe he is going blah blah to some Taliban.’

Ellen glanced out of the window at the swirling dust, the blank brown landscape. They were in the middle of nowhere. ‘Oh, come on.’

When she looked back at Jalil, he was frowning.

‘Maybe they’re just cousins.’ She sighed to herself. She’d hurt his pride. ‘He seemed friendly enough.’

‘You saw his smile?’

‘What about it?’

Jalil pointed to his own mouth. ‘So much of gold in his teeth. New gold.’

Ellen shrugged. So what? He had gold teeth.

‘His watch?’ Jalil ran his hand round his wrist. ‘Foreign watch. New.’ Jalil paused, watching her reaction. ‘Who gave him all this money?’

He faced forward again. His hair was sticking together in clumps along the top of his neck.

Ellen thought about what he’d said. The teeth, the watch. She hadn’t noticed them. Jalil had. ‘He could be a businessman,’ she said. ‘A trader.’

Jalil gave a dismissive grunt. ‘Business?’ He gestured out of the window at the emptiness of the desert. ‘Here?’

She paused and considered. Maybe Jalil was smarter than he looked. He just wasn’t loud. ‘Blah, blah,’ she said. She was used to Afghan men with big egos. Jalil was different. She lifted her own hand and opened and closed it like a mouth, as he had done. ‘Blah blah, blah blah.’

He turned back to see and she snapped her hand open and closed at him until they both started to laugh, saying ‘blah, blah’ stupidly to each other as the driver swung back onto the road and they headed through the dry, swirling dust towards the next village.

Now, in this grieving house, the call to prayer gave a final burst of static and came to a close. Silence reached into the room. Ellen shifted her weight. It was already late.

‘Manana.’ Thank you. She placed her right hand on her heart in a gesture of thanks and bowed her head to Jalil’s mother. Ellen unravelled her legs and rubbed her ankles to bring them back to life. She reached forward to gather together the scattered dishes and help to clear them. Jalil’s sister protested, pushing Ellen’s hands away and scolding her softly, as Ellen knew she would.

In the dim hallway, she covered her head with a voluminous scarf, wound the ends round her neck to keep it in place and bent to lace up her boots. Jalil’s mother had retreated to the kitchen and only the daughter was hovering, adjusting her own scarf nervously in folds round her head and shoulders as she watched Ellen prepare to leave.

Ellen gestured the girl to come towards her. In a quick movement, she took a bundle of dollars from her pocket, folded the girl’s long fingers round the money and enclosed her hands for a moment in the mesh of her own. Behind them rose a clatter of dishes, shifting in the sink. A tap coughed and water splashed onto a hard surface. The girl hesitated and opened her mouth to protest.

‘Balay,’ said Ellen. Yes. Her voice was firm. ‘Please.’

The girl prised off Ellen’s fingers and thrust the money back at her. Her eyes were proud. She knows what Jalil asked me, Ellen thought. She blames me. The money was thick and greasy in her hands. Dirty. She pushed it back into her pocket. She and the girl stared at each other, unspeaking.

The moment was ended by Jalil’s mother who came out to them from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel. Her scarf had fallen back to her shoulders. Her hair, prematurely grey, was clipped into a bun, dripping strands.

She embraced Ellen, kissing her on both cheeks, then pressed herself against her body. She smelt of rose-water and spices and her hair was dry and prickly against the soft skin of Ellen’s neck. She pulled back and took Ellen’s hands in her own. She clasped them, looking up into her eyes. Her palms were hot and firm. Her eyes looked so like his. Deep brown with fragments of light radiating outwards. As she spoke, Ellen read the concern there.

‘Don’t go, she is saying.’ The daughter was standing beside them, her voice cool as she translated her mother’s words. ‘It’s too dangerous. Don’t go to Helmand, she says. Go back to your own country and forget your work here. Be safe.’

His mother embraced her a second time. Ellen felt the hardness of the smaller woman’s ribs against her own flesh, the compact muscle of years of labour.

‘I must go,’ she said at last. She put her hands on Jalil’s mother’s shoulders and lifted her away. ‘I’ve got stories to file.’

His mother was reaching up to Ellen’s cheek, patting it with a cupped hand.

‘I’ll find out,’ Ellen said. ‘Tell her. I’ll find out what happened to Jalil.’

His mother spoke once more as her daughter unbolted the door and opened it. The family’s guard, standing outside in the shadows, rushed forward, his rifle glinting in the half-light. He escorted Ellen across the shabby courtyard to the high metal gate set in the compound wall. His mother had used one of the phrases Jalil had taught Ellen in the time they’d worked together. One she didn’t need anyone else to translate for her. May Allah bless you, she’d said. May Allah protect you.

2 (#ulink_cc0d4473-9c92-5128-a401-3064ab665fa9)

The C-130 was a whale of an aircraft. It rattled and groaned as it flew them over the desert towards the base. The vibrations trembled through her bones as she sat, strapped in place against the aircraft’s outer shell, against a climbing frame of military webbing. The army-issue earplugs had moulded themselves to the inside of her ears, but the noise was still deafening. Too loud to breathe.

All along the edge of the aircraft and down its central spine, sharing a running canvas seat, young soldiers were dozing, their heads lolling forward against their chests. They were solid and thick limbed, prickling with kit, guns upright between their thighs. The low military lights in the ceiling were painting them a ghoulish underwater green, sickly as corpses. She looked down the row of faces. They were hard jawed with sharp haircuts, their skin slackened by sleep, iPods in their ears. The more wars she covered, the younger they got. It was airless. Her muscles were tense with apprehension. She shifted her weight, wiped her forehead.

The two young air crew at the rear unbuckled their lap-belts, clipped on safety lines and started to move round the aircraft, signalling to each other, positioning loads and preparing for landing. The lumbering transport plane slid to one side, then dropped.

She thought of the desert below, endlessly flat and barren and peppered with stones. It would be black there now but when she closed her eyes, she saw it as she remembered it, in daylight, a scarred land, the colour of grey-brown nothingness, a land flayed to its skeleton. Jagged ridges of mountains rising, sharp with shadows and the contours of vast bite marks gouged out of the earth. The only signs of human life were the occasional stick figures of boys, herding goats, and the square compounds of weatherworn houses, their mud walls rubbed smooth like wave-lapped sandcastles, surviving in the middle of all this lifelessness. The only shade was cast by the broad silhouette of the aircraft, running along beneath them, darkening the earth below.

There was a mechanical shudder as the back of the aircraft cranked open, showing dirty night sky. The smell of dust filled her nostrils as it rushed in, coating everything like softly falling brown snow. They were almost down.

As they landed, the dirt rose in clouds, filling the air with fine sand. She ran down the back ramp in sequence, clumsy with the weight of the rucksack on her back and the beetle-case of her flak jacket, into the hot scour of the blast from the aircraft. She followed the dark shape of the young soldier ahead of her, through the swirling sandstorm, over shifting pebbles, to the wire fence that signalled the outer edge of the base.

A young sergeant with a clipboard led her through the warren of structures. Past the NAAFI store where knots of soldiers were sitting idly at Formica tables on a wooden porch, nursing cups of bad coffee. Past the deserted cookhouse and the giant tents, with their male and female ablution blocks, to a small accommodation tent where they’d found her a berth. He unzipped the heavy canvas outer flap and held it for her as she ducked through, her back aching from the rucksack and the cramped journey.

‘Scoff from seven to eight tomorrow,’ he whispered. ‘You’ll find the cookhouse?’

The tent was dark. She ran a torch beam along the row of green canvas camp beds to find the only one without bedding, and dropped her rucksack by it. Dark sleeping-bag caterpillars lay on most of the others. She looked quickly over the spaces between the beds, at the sand-coloured clothes-tidies hanging down from the ceiling, neatly piled with socks and shirts and books. At the rows of flip-flops, trainers and army boots tucked below. The camp bed next to hers, against the end wall, had a leaning cork board, crammed with snapshots of party groups, young women with arms round each other’s shoulders, sticking out tongues, pulling faces, raising bottles of beer to the camera. They were framed by a mess of greetings cards of cartoon bears and kittens and dogs and a giant cut-out heart, emblazoned with the words: Luv ya loads!

The washing line that ran across the back of the tent was strewn with stiffly dried pink and green towels and camouflage trousers. She sat for a moment on the edge of the bed, aware of the heaviness in her limbs. I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the army, she thought, looking round. Far too soft. And far too rebellious.

The night air was heavy with stale sweat, overlaid with the perfume of cheap talcum powder and soft with female breathing. The sudden roar of an aircraft engine cut through from outside. She listened, trying to identify it as the sound peaked, then faded away into the night. She nodded to herself. Despite all the discomfort and danger, war zones made her feel more fully alive than any other place she knew.

She dug out her towel and wash-bag and lit a path by torch to the ablution block, where she showered off the dust in a stainless-steel cubicle, punching the valve repeatedly for spurts of lukewarm water to rinse herself off. Army life. She looked at herself in the mirror as she towelled herself dry, taking in the slackness of her skin. One of these days, she thought, I’ll be too old for this. But not quite yet.

Her cot would be stiff and uncomfortable, she knew. But she was exhausted. She’d sleep.

At breakfast the next day, she sat at the end of a trestle table in the cookhouse, absorbing the clatter and chat of the soldiers around her and sawing with a plastic knife at a piece of bacon in a mess of cooling baked beans. Printed notices were stuck to the inner wall of the tent with tape. ‘Your Mother doesn’t work here. Clean up after yourself.’ Beneath it was a list of ‘Rules of the Cookhouse’ in smaller print. She thought of Jalil, wondering if he’d eaten here, what he’d made of life with the British army. It was still hard to believe she’d never see him again.