The Abrupt Physics of Dying Read online

  Clay ruffled the boy’s thin black hair. ‘Cheeky monkey,’ he said, something his father used to say.

  Soon they were trundling down the narrow track away from the hamlet, Mohamed perched on Clay’s lap, bony hands clutching the Land Cruiser’s steering wheel. The boy steered with him, matching his movements. After a while, the boy directed him onto a rough stone track. The vehicle creaked and lurched past terraced flats of stubble wedged between rocky outcrops towards the cleft in the cliffs. The pitch of the track steepened. After a while Clay stopped, jumped out to lock the hubs, kept going. He thought again about the woman in the Land Rover, the surprise he’d felt seeing her, the perfect symmetry of her features, her big dark eyes.

  Soon they had penetrated the opening in the cliffs where the wadi met the line of the escarpment. So blinding was the light reflected from the sheer wall of limestone that he had to look away, over to the darkness of the facing formations sheltered from the full fury of the sun. They descended into the bleached cauldron of the wadi bed and then climbed again towards the afternoon shade of the far cliffs. The track became rougher and less distinct. Clay felt his way up the hill, the tyres slipping on the loose stone.

  ‘Stop,’ said the boy. ‘Now walk.’

  They started up the slope towards the patch of green that marked the spring. After a few moments Clay stopped and looked back. Mohamed was already far behind. The boy struggled and stumbled on the loose scree, breathing heavily, his face covered in sweat. He stopped and looked up at Clay, swaying on bony legs. He opened his mouth as if he were about to call out, but then his face twisted in pain and he doubled over, his back and shoulders shaking as he spewed vomit to the ground in a series of wrenching contractions.

  Clay ran down the slope, skidding along the loose scree to where the boy stood. He put his hand on Mohamed’s back, feeling the last spasm shudder through his thin frame. The boy looked up and smiled. Vomit covered his chin and the front of his shirt. Clay crouched down and unwrapped his keffiyeh and wiped the boy’s face and his shirt and ran his hand through the boy’s dark hair.

  ‘Tammam?’ Clay asked, giving the thumbs up. ‘OK?’

  The boy nodded, managing a weak smile.

  Then Clay hoisted him onto his shoulders and carried him up the hill, skin and bones, of no weight at all. At the top of the scree slope they came to a sharp vertical bluff as high as a camel’s back. The bluff’s frayed, fractured lip ran some hundred metres or more across the wadi to meet the cliff face, as if it had been tossed carelessly from the plateau to fall draped over the edge. A footpath ran along its base in both directions. Clay turned away from the cliff and started down the path towards the wadi bed, the bluff on his right, Mohamed’s wet hands clasped across his forehead. He could feel the boy’s pulse against his own skull, rapid, tripping, excited.

  After a few steps the boy shook his legs and tugged at Clay’s ears. ‘La,’ said the little voice from above.

  ‘What is it?’

  The boy pointed back to the cliffs. ‘I show you,’ he said in English. ‘Faddar.’ Please.

  ‘OK, little brother.’ Clay spun on his feet and started back along the bluff footpath towards the cliff, the little hamlet spread below them on the right. Soon he was threading his way through a maze of boulders, the path narrowing so that in places he had to turn side on – Mohamed still on his shoulders, urging him forward with little kicks, as though Clay was some mountain donkey and he a travelling Mullah. The rock dwarfed them on all sides, and it was as if they had been swallowed up by the lifeless, uncaring age of the place.

  Mohammed squeezed Clay’s head. ‘Stop,’ he said in English, pointing to the bluff. At first Clay did not see what the boy was showing him, such was its unity with the surrounding rock. It seemed impossible, but there it was – a scale of steps hewn into the limestone, a passageway disappearing into the rock. ‘Aiwa, aiwa,’ said Mohamed. Yes.

  The stairway, ancient surely, twisted up into the core of the bluff, the sides handtool-etched so that he could almost hear the men chipping away at the rock through the centuries. He climbed steadily, heart working harder now, cooler here in the bowels of the earth, his shoulders scraping the sides in places, until they emerged into sunlight so bright he had to shut his eyes.

  The oasis was a series of five spring-fed rock pools set in the barren footings of the canyon’s towering rock face, shaded by palms and acacia. The spring pulsed from the ground as if pumped from a heart, the clear water cascading over the grooved limestone from one pool to the next and the one after that. The place teemed with life: small green fish with silver bellies darted in the deep cool water, frogs croaked in the fringing reed banks, insects buzzed in dense shifting clouds of colour. It was one of the most beautiful places he had ever seen.

  A group of children splashed in the deepest of the pools. They smiled as he approached. Their gums, too, were red and inflamed, their skin dappled with sores. At the water’s edge, two women, clearly blessed by Allah, heavy with child, laid out their washing on the smooth rocks to dry in the sun. They whispered to each other as he approached. Clay looked towards them. One of the women raised her hands to her face and looked away. But the other met his gaze, and for a short moment she stared at him with dark, brazen eyes. Then she smiled and her teenage face vanished behind a drawn veil.

  Clay swung the boy down to the ground and crouched before him. He took the boy’s face in his hands and turned it to one side and the other. ‘Tammam? OK?’

  ‘I am tired,’ the boy replied in a thin, high-pitched voice.

  Clay pulled a sweet from his pocket, offered it to the boy.

  Mohamed held out his hand. It was covered in blood from Clay’s head. ‘You are hurt,’ he said.

  Clay reached for the boy’s other hand, dropped the sweet into his palm, patted him on the head. ‘I am fine, al hamdillulah.’

  The boy muttered the same words, thanks be to God, closed his fingers around the candy, held it a moment, pulled off the wrapper, then popped it in his mouth.

  Clay knelt and put his lips to the water. The first touch was cool, the water sweet. The boy crouched beside him and did the same.

  Clay stood and sniffed the air. Iodine, salt, empty miles of hazy blue. The wind was from the sea. He reached into his pack and fished out an empty plastic water bottle, opened the cap. He was not prepared, but this would have to do. He crouched by the edge and dipped the bottle in the pool until the mouth was half submerged and held it there as it filled. Clay stood, stashed the bottle in his pack, and looked up at the women busy with their laundry. ‘Stay here, Mohamed,’ he said.

  ‘I want to come.’

  ‘I will come back. I have work.’

  The boy bent the twig of an arm around Clay’s leg. ‘You are my friend,’ he said.

  Clay smiled. He crouched and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. ‘You are my friend, too,’ he said in Arabic. He reached into his pocket and poured a handful of sweets into the boy’s outstretched hands.

  He left Mohamed at the pools and set off along the gradually constricting wadi bed. After half an hour of hard walking he came to a place where the canyon narrowed into a steep defile. Vertical dolomite cliffs embraced a sheer fault line that blocked the way. He stopped and looked up. There was not a whisper of air, nor any angle in the sun to throw shadows. He turned and wiped the back of his hand across his brow and down his temple and looked back towards the green of the oasis no more than a kilometre below, little Mohamed just a speck now, still waiting by the water. Whatever Al Shams thought was happening here, there was no sign of it. Was the truth being spoken?

  Is a woman beautiful or ugly? A glance is not enough. To know, you must marry her. That’s what Abdulkader would have said.

  Getting the Tone Just Right

  He made the long journey back to Aden on autopilot, hundreds of kilometres of dusty, potholed road vanishing without a trace, mountains and bluffs, the black cinder cones of the Aden plain no more than a blur in the side window
, the changeless sky as empty as a non-believer’s soul, as blank.

  It was early evening when Clay arrived in the waiting room of Petro-Tex’s main Yemen operations office. He smiled at the busty blonde secretary. It came out more like a scowl. ‘Howzit, Greta?’

  She looked up at him, eyes narrowing. ‘OK, Clay?’ she said in a distinct Scandinavian accent. ‘What happened to your face?’

  Clay raised his hand to his jaw, the scrapes from when he’d hit the ground after being knocked unconscious. ‘I was run over by a beautiful woman in Land Rover.’

  She smiled, waved this away. She had lovely blue-green eyes. ‘I never thanked you for the Kahlua.’ Clay brought her a duty-free bottle every time he came into Yemen. You couldn’t get it locally. ‘Go right in,’ she said.

  Nils Karila sat behind a large desk strewn with papers, a shard of Indian Ocean blue just visible through the wood-framed window behind him. Production charts, reservoir maps, petro-physical logs and impenetrable seismic tracings covered the dingy walls. A rectangular picture frame hung on the bookcase, Karila and three blond children in red and blue winter jackets peering out from a polar snowscape. Slumped in his chair, he tapped with two fingers on a yellowing keyboard, the computer monitor looming above him like a stern and remote superior. His thin white hair was combed back over his scalp, barely covering the pink, sunburned skin.

  ‘What do you want, Mister Straker?’ Karila said without looking up from the keyboard.

  ‘I …’ Clay stumbled, stopped, stared out the window. On the long drive back he’d rehearsed the message over and again, a hundred variants, playing out Karila’s response in his head. And each time he had reached the same conclusion: there was no way to deliver Al Shams’ message without endangering Abdulkader.

  ‘Your report, Straker?’

  ‘You’ll have it in two weeks.’

  ‘One week. You know the situation.’

  If he told Nils now, they’d send in the Army. ‘My invoice for the Kamar project hasn’t been paid yet,’ he said. ‘It’s been three months, Nils. I’m swak. Dead broke.’

  Karila stopped typing and looked up from the keyboard. Albino eyes blinked behind a pair of wire-framed glasses; a burning Gitane hung from his mouth. He looked like he had worked through the night. ‘Accounts assure me it will be paid this week.’

  If he didn’t tell Karila, he’d have no reply for Al Shams. ‘That’s what you said last month.’

  ‘We are all very busy here, Mister Straker.’

  Clay looked around the room. Would Petro-Tex try to get Abdulkader back? They’d never had a hostage situation before. ‘Someone’s getting paid, then.’

  Karila glanced up at him, disapproval etched into every crease of his pursed pink lips. ‘I’ll speak to Dunkley today.’ Dunkley was the operation’s chief accountant.

  Clay nodded, shuffled his feet. ‘Ever think it’s a curse, Nils?’

  Karila hit the enter key, flicked his gaze across the screen for a moment, then looked up again. ‘Curse? What are you talking about, Straker?’

  ‘Oil.’ Clay pointed to the wintertime photo. ‘The cost.’

  Karila glanced down at the picture frame, seemed to ponder this a moment, directed a stream of blue smoke at the ceiling with a long sigh. ‘I’ve got a lot to do, Straker. Do you have something to report or not?’

  Clay stood looking down at Karila, unsure where to start. ‘Are you hearing anything unusual from the Oil Ministry?’

  Karila waved at the air with his burning cigarette. ‘I was in Sana’a the day before yesterday. The Minister mentioned nothing out of the ordinary. Why?’

  He edged towards it. He had to try. ‘It’s getting tense out there, Nils. Rumours, threats.’

  ‘If you are concerned you should take an Army escort, as I have repeatedly advised. That’s what we pay them for. I don’t understand why you insist on going out there for weeks at a time, alone.’

  ‘I have Abdulkader.’ Had.

  Karila scoffed. ‘One day you are going to get yourself into real trouble, Straker.’

  He’d heard the same advice a decade ago, hadn’t taken it then. ‘Do you know who makes up that Army, Nils? Northerners, Zaydis: highlanders from tribes loyal to President Saleh. They’re Shi’a, Nils. The people here hate them. They’ve been blood enemies for centuries.’

  That same pucker of distaste. ‘I have no interest in the local politics. My job is to get oil out of the ground. And you have been hired to assist in that goal, Mister Straker.’

  ‘And to do it, I need the people’s confidence. That is not going to happen with the Army shadowing me. Do you want your approvals, or have you decided to skip that technicality?’

  Karila peered at him over smudged glasses. ‘Not funny, Straker. Getting those permits as quickly as possible is a serious matter.’

  ‘Then let me do my job.’

  ‘As you like, Straker. I take no responsibility.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  Karila frowned and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on his desk. ‘Now is there anything else, Straker?’ He turned his wrist, exposed the white veinless skin of his forearm, glanced at his watch. ‘If I don’t have this production report on Parnell’s desk within the hour, he is going to crucify me.’

  Clay planted his feet. ‘The villagers are concerned.’

  Karila dismissed this with a swipe of his Gitane.

  ‘I’m serious, Nils.’

  Karila looked up. ‘The usual complaints about jobs and money?’

  ‘Always. But something’s changed. They’re talking about a sickness. They say it’s coming from the CPF. We should check it out.’

  ‘We are not in the social services business, Straker.’

  ‘They’re angry, Nils. They could make things difficult for us.’

  ‘We cannot afford needless distractions. I need not remind you that we have a drop-dead date that is rapidly approaching. Focus on that.’

  Clay thrust his hand deep into his trouser pocket, jangled worthless Yemeni coins through his fingers. ‘OK, Nils. Understood.’ He said it out of habit. He said it so that his client would know that he was part of the team, dependable. If you wanted to survive as a contractor, you had to espouse the common objective. He was pretty good now at getting the tone just right.

  ‘Pay who you need to pay, Straker. We need the approvals in place within the next four weeks or we start cutting into the schedule. Every day we delay costs money. Did you tell them about the school we are going to build them?’

  ‘Ja, the school,’ Clay said under his breath.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘That you would build them a school.’

  ‘Good, Straker. Good.’

  The warmth of client praise flowed through him. It felt a lot like the dull burn of cheap vodka.

  A determinedly overweight man in a pink golf shirt and pleated khaki trousers staggered wheezing into the office and collapsed into one of the leather armchairs across from Karila’s desk. He was breathing heavily. Sweat glistened on his forehead, tracked across the cratered folds and overhangs of his strangely pallid, humid face. He looked like a burn victim stripped of his face bandages for the first time, pale, hairless, scarred, oiled and balmed. The man fumbled with his pockets, withdrew a plastic inhaler, put it to his mouth and thumbed the trigger. He sat a moment, chest heaving, eyes closed. After a while his breathing eased and he opened his eyes, blinked twice, glared at Clay.

  ‘Fuck me, I do so hate this place,’ he said in a constricted wheeze. He spoke exceedingly slowly, hovering on each word, drawling it into the next like a Baptist preacher gone rogue. ‘Nothin’ but dust here. Goddamn place is from dust made.’

  ‘Hello Vance,’ said Karila, brightening. ‘You know Clay Straker, our environmental and community contractor.’

  Clay nodded. They’d met once, in Parnell’s office a year ago when Clay had first been contracted. Since then, he’d heard the rumours, of course. It was hard not to. But he’d ign
ored them, gone about his work, kept quiet. Time in the Battalion had taught him the percentage of bullshit that rumour usually contained.

  Parnell stuffed his inhaler back into his trouser pocket and stared at Karila, dark-marble eyes twitching in shallow sockets. For a moment he looked as if he was going to speak, but then he just closed his eyes and slowly shook his head, left to right, back again, muttering something that Clay could not make out. Then he opened his eyes and ran his glare over Clay. ‘My friend Karila, on the other hand, he loves it here,’ Parnell said in his thick Southern accent. ‘Ain’t that right, Nils?’

  Karila started to mumble a reply but Parnell cut him off, stared at Clay. ‘What the hell happened to you?’

  Clay glanced at Karila, back at Parnell. ‘I’ve been halfway converted, if that’s what you mean. Still an infidel though.’

  Disdain flashed in Parnell’s eyes. ‘No, that ain’t what I mean, Straker. I don’t give a goddamn about your journey spiritual.’ He shook his head, jowls swaying. ‘Stone-age religion for fucking Neanderthals, in my opinion.’ He pointed at Clay’s neck. ‘You’re bleeding. That’s what I mean.’

  Clay reached up and touched his neck. His fingers came away wet with blood. He looked at Parnell. ‘Cut my head.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘With a flint hand tool.’

  Parnell glanced at Karila and raised his eyebrows. Or rather he raised the hairless flesh on the ridge above his eye sockets, where two arched brows, pencil thin, had been clumsily drawn in with some kind of makeup, like something a young girl might do using her mother’s compact. ‘I don’t really give a shit how you did it, Straker,’ he said. ‘I don’t want it showing up on our health and safety figures. You got me?’

  Clay said nothing, just stood staring at Parnell, thinking about Abdulkader.

  ‘Mister Straker has been visiting the villages in the expansion area,’ said Karila, quickly interjecting, the peacemaker.

  Parnell ran his index finger along the edge of Karila’s desk, streaked a line in the thin layer of brown silt that covered the wood, examined his fingertip, sniffed at it like a cur. ‘Well? Whatcha gotta report, Straker?’