The Abrupt Physics of Dying Read online

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘French.’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘Great guy. The best.’

  Clay looked over his shoulder. There was no one else in the room, the corridor was quiet. ‘Do you know why Al Qaeda would have wanted him dead?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘The same guys have my driver, Abdulkader.’

  Jim drained his beer, set the tin on the floor, tugged at the worn peak of his cap. ‘He’d been in country for a while before I started here. Who knows what people get up to?’

  ‘He never said anything to you?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Nothing to suggest conflict with the locals?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘A woman perhaps?’

  ‘Ever meet his wife?’

  Clay recalled the pang that had lodged in his throat that day on the way to the airport, looking at the photos of Champard’s family. A family of his own. Funny how something you’d always taken for granted would just happen, could turn to an irrelevancy, an impossibility, so quickly. Without ever really thinking about it. Just there one day, and not there after. There had been a girl, once. They’d dated in high school but lost touch when he went into the Army. He’d come back on leave, a few months into his second tour, and she’d been waiting for him in the crowd at the airport. She’d been wearing a sexy, strapless, cotton summer dress and he remembered how her skin had felt when he’d held her, standing there in the arrivals hall with people streaming past them and the smell of shampoo in her hair and the way she was everything that the war wasn’t, clean and soft and safe. He remembered the surprise at seeing her there, the way she’d thrown her arms around him, the way she’d run her fingers through his freshly cut hair. She’d tracked him down through his uncle, she’d said through the tears, after hearing about his parents’ death. The next day he’d borrowed a mate’s bakkie and they’d driven south to the ocean and along the coast to Port Shepstone, and taken a hotel room on the beach. She’d been warm and sympathetic and they’d made love as if it were their last days on Earth. He thought she might ask him about the war but she hadn’t, and he’d realised he had no way of telling her anyway. A day later he asked her to marry him and she said yes. He was twenty and she was nineteen. They picked out a ring for her – a tiny flawed diamond set in fourteen-carat gold, all he could afford – in a shop in Durban the day he went back to the war. He’d written her for almost a year, whenever he could, until he was wounded again. She’d come to see him in the military hospital in Johannesburg, but by then he was someone else. He’d been distant and hurtful, his anger spilling out uncontrollably. She’d left the ring in an envelope with one of the nurses.

  ‘Money trouble?’ asked Clay.

  ‘I said no, Straker. Drop it, OK?’

  Clay swirled the beer in his tin and eased back into the couch. ‘Dropped.’

  Zdravko Todorov appeared at the common room doorway, a black duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He smiled, sat on the couch next to Clay, stared at the TV. Tomcat fighters catapulted from a carrier deck, afterburners roaring. Clay ignored him.

  After a while Zdravko leaned over from the other end of the couch and said to Clay: ‘American shit weapons.’ He pronounced it sheet, weapons with a v.

  ‘I heard that, asshole,’ said Jim from the lounge chair.

  ‘I am Zdravko,’ said the man, winking at Clay, ‘not asshole.’ Assxole.

  ‘With a name like that, you should be called asshole.’

  ‘Does not change anything, my American friend. American weapons shit.’ Zdravko laughed as if this was the funniest thing he had ever heard and clapped Clay on the back. ‘Too complicated, breaking down, needs too much training to use,’ he said to Clay behind a raised hand, sharing a secret. ‘Russian weapons good. Bulgarian weapons good.’ Zdravko palmed a small black pistol, examined it in an open palm. ‘Makarov,’ he said. ‘Shoots good.’

  ‘You and your fuckin’ weapons.’ Jim stood up and stormed out, cursing under his breath.

  Zdravko pocketed the pistol and smiled at Clay. He stood and walked to the TV and ejected the DVD. ‘Now we watch some real action,’ he said, inserting another disc. He smiled, sat down on the couch, and banged a bottle of vodka on the table. Smirnoff Export overproof.

  ‘My new friend,’ said Zdravko. ‘Drink with me.’ The new DVD loaded, Zdravko hit play, thrust out his hand. Clay took it. Zdravko’s handshake was a vice. Hours of gym time. Zdravko unscrewed the cap, held it on end between index finger and thumb as if inspecting for defects, took aim and flicked it out of the window. ‘With friends, no need for this,’ he said, landing a frying-pan hand on Clay’s shoulder.

  Clay stared at Zdravko’s hand, into his eyes. ‘Checking up on me?’ he said.

  ‘You hear Parnell. Go to PSO, everything OK.’ Zdravko took a swig from the bottle, passed it to Clay.

  Clay swallowed a mouthful of vodka, then another, passed the bottle back, and stared at the TV screen. Zdravko’s movie had started out conventionally, pretty young things in risqué PVC, pink and hairless, sucking as if their lives depended on it. Now it was becoming noticeably harder. A lithesome brunette with silicone tits and perfect skin was being fucked by three men. When her mouth wasn’t full, she cried out in dubbed English. The men were built like Zdravko, heavily muscled, with impossibly large penises and no pubic hair. Clay wished Zdravko would turn the sound down.

  Zdravko beamed and passed the bottle, half-empty now. ‘You like? Look, dual completion,’ he laughed, an old oilfield joke. ‘Good Bulgarian girls. You come with me to Bulgaria, I introduce you to girls like this, yes? Good girls. Not American pussy-whippers.’

  It had been a long time since he had been with a woman, but the skin-mag marionettes on the screen weren’t doing anything for him. ‘I’ll look you up next time I’m in Sofia,’ he said, raising the bottle to his lips.

  ‘This place is shit hole, yes? No women, no nothing. Just desert.’ Zdravko refilled his glass. ‘Only good thing is shooting. Everyone here is shooting.’ He reached to the floor and unzipped a small duffel bag at his feet. ‘This good weapon,’ he said, handing Clay a short-barrelled sub-machine gun with a huge curved banana-clip.

  Clay put the bottle on the table, hefted the weapon in his hands. It was surprisingly light, compact. ‘AK74U,’ said Clay.

  Zdravko raised his eyebrows. ‘You know.’

  ‘I’ve …’ Clay stopped, took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been on the receiving end.’

  Another stare, longer this time. ‘We call her Ksyuka, Russian girl name. Small – 5.45 millimetre. She hot. Shoots hot.’ Zdravko looked over his shoulder and took back the weapon.

  Weapons were ubiquitous in Yemen, but it was the first time he had seen a Petro-Tex contractor carrying anything quite so lethal here in Aden. Clay swallowed another mouthful of vodka, feeling it now, that familiar distance, like low cloud settling.

  ‘Close range, cuts man in two pieces.’ Zdravko drew his hand across his belly, left to right. ‘Even idiot Parnell can do.’

  Clay said nothing, stared at the screen, the girl’s face dripping.

  Zdravko tipped the bottle to his mouth, ‘Tonight I go shooting. Come.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Clay said, his insides lurching. ‘I have work tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow Friday, Straker. Day off.’

  ‘Maybe next time.’

  Zdravko shrugged as if to say that it was his loss. ‘Not good, fucking terrorist assholes taking your driver.’

  ‘Not good at all.’ Terrorists. That’s what they had called SWAPO, too, back then: fokken terrs.

  ‘You lucky,’ said Zdravko, pointing the Ksyuka at his own chest, then Clay’s. ‘I find them.’

  Clay pushed the barrel away. He was pretty sure he wanted this guy nowhere near Abdulkader.

  ‘What you do here, my friend?’ said Zdravko.

  ‘I spend most of my time trying to get paid.’

  Zdravko laughed. It was a big lau
gh, big like him. ‘Getting money from Petro-Tex is like getting blow job from Yemeni woman.’ He roared again, eyes dancing, slugged more vodka and drew the back of his hand across his mouth. He tapped the Ksyuka’s magazine. It sounded full. ‘Don’t worry, my friend. We find assholes who take your driver. I cut them in two.’ Zdravko pushed the bottle into Clay’s hands.

  Clay tightened his jaw, took a gulp, another. ‘How much time have you spent in Yemen?’ Not a lot, he guessed.

  ‘Too much.’ Zdravko slid his business card across the table: Z. Todorov, BRS Supply, Sofia.

  Clay flipped his own card onto the table. Capricorn Consulting, an impressive name for a struggling one-man enterprise. He had set up in Cyprus almost three years ago, as much for the favourable tax regime as for the obscurity, a place to disappear to for a while. But clients had been hard to come by, rates low, his expenses far too high. He’d landed a few small jobs in Egypt and Jordan, but Petro-Tex had been his first big break, on paper at least.

  Clay twisted Zdravko’s card in his fingers, feeling the alcohol swim in his head. ‘What kind of supply?’ he slurred.

  Zdravko grinned and poured out the last of the vodka. ‘Usual stuff. Good business here in Yemen. Very, very good. This trip, I make enough money, I never work again. Go home, get girlfriend like that. Two.’ He pointed at the pulsing screen.

  Clay raised his eyes, finished the vodka. ‘Clearly I’m in the wrong line of work.’

  The Bulgarian smiled. ‘You drink good, Aussie.’

  If Zdravko wanted to think he was an Aussie, that was fine with him. For all he knew this guy could have been on the other side. There had been enough Cubans and Russians crawling around Angola in ’79 and ’80. Why not Bulgarians, too? He looked the right age – swallowed into the vortex with so many others, young, with ideals perhaps, dreams, thrown into the maelstrom and then excreted like so much waste, dead and maimed together in one stinking turd. He had that look: the ranging stare, the furtive flicking hyper-awareness, the fuck-you sneer.

  ‘Not like these American pussies,’ said Zdravko.

  ‘With their crap weapons,’ said Clay.

  Zdravko boomed out a laugh, lifted the bottle, guzzled.

  Clay looked at his watch. It was gone midnight and the movie was finished. He stood to leave, unsteady.

  Zdravko grabbed his arm and pulled him back. ‘You fight, Aussie? You like to fight?’

  Clay laughed, but a spike of adrenaline pierced the vodka haze. His fingertips tingled with the surge. His mind cleared. He squared up to the Bulgarian. ‘Depends.’

  Zdravko smiled, put down the vodka bottle, and flicked out a quick left jab. The strike was hard, but aimed low, just under Clay’s collarbone. Clay caught it easily with his left forearm, down and across, sending Zdravko’s fist glancing harmlessly away. He shifted back, ready to counterpunch, stared the Bulgarian in the eyes.

  Zdravko laughed, opened his right hand and clapped Clay on the shoulder. Clay let it land.

  ‘Good,’ said Zdravko.

  ‘No,’ said Clay. ‘Not very good.’

  ‘Shotokan?’

  Johannesburg streets, he thought. Parachute Regiment training school, Bloemfontein. South African border war. But what he said was: ‘Renbukai. Ikkyu. Brown belt.’

  Zdravko laughed. ‘Good enough.’ He reached into his bag, produced another bottle, slammed it down on the table. ‘Now, we start real drinking.’

  Twisting by the Pool

  He opened the fridge, pulled out a near-empty bottle of Smirnoff and a chilled glass tumbler and clunked them down on the papers scattered across his desk. His ears were still ringing from the shooting and the back of his skull felt like it was going to peel open and spill out his brains. Outside the second-floor room, the bank of air conditioners groaned at full power. Friday morning, and the streets were deserted, the faithful thronging the mosques and then off to chew the afternoon away. A holy day, a day of rest. He rolled the cold bottle over his forehead, poured a full glass and downed it in one go. The cold liquid burned his throat. He walked to the window and wound down the shutters against the sun, catching a glimpse of his face in the glass, his father’s nose, his mother’s eyes and teeth.

  He had stayed for the second bottle. Halfway through, Zdravko had led him stumbling downstairs to his car, a big new black Land Rover, and driven him, lights spinning, to the outskirts of the city, talking non-stop, laughing that big laugh, until they reached an open piece of ground abutting the mountains. Zdravko had opened the back, lifted a panel, pulled out a Ksyuka and a couple of bandoliers of magazines and handed them to Clay. There must have been at least a dozen other weapons stashed in the hidden compartment, familiar-looking AK47s, a Russian-made Dragunov sniper rifle with an attached bipod and scope, at least two Uzis. Zdravko hauled out a muslin sack and threw it over his shoulder, grabbed two steel stakes and a sledgehammer, slammed the trunk closed. ‘Could only get goat,’ he muttered. ‘We pretend is small Yemeni fucker, yes?’ In a few minutes he had pounded the stakes into the ground about twenty metres from the car and trussed up the goat’s carcass so it hung splayed and racked, white in the Mercedes’ headlights. Then he stepped back and handed Clay the bottle.

  ‘Watch this, Aussie.’ Zdravko stood, checked the Ksyuka’s magazine, chambered a round, and banged off the whole mag in one go. The almost bisected halves of the carcass hung ragged from the ropes. Zdravko boomed and slapped Clay on the back. He was jumping up and down like a kid at Christmas, yelling, ‘You see that Aussie? You see that? Like I say, yes? So fucking hot. You see that?’ He changed mags and then set about ripping off a couple hundred rounds, emptying clip after clip, spraying wildly, the tracers ricocheting like fireworks in the night. Then it was Clay’s turn. He picked a target, a cluster of stones at the limit of the Merc’s lights and squeezed off a short controlled burst, then another, feeling the hideous, wonderful power of the thing. By this time Zdravko was weaving dangerously, the empty vodka bottle still hanging from his hand, talking wildly in Bulgarian, waving at him, yelling, ‘Shoot, motherfucker, shoot’, exploding in laughter each time Clay let off a burst. It was gone four in the morning when they stumbled back to the guesthouse.

  It had been two days since he’d left Abdulkader in the desert. He tried to focus on the computer screen, on the work, this report that he would soon deliver to the hapless Yemeni regulators, another box to be ticked in the meaningless dance that passed for an environmental approvals process. His fingers moved over the keyboard. ‘State of the art environmental controls applied to all stages of the production cycle.’ The pixels glowed in the shuttered gloom. The cursor blinked away the minutes at the full stop.

  He poured another vodka and picked up the letter from Eben’s parents. The usual stuff: widespread damage, coma. Worse now, it sounded, than when he had last seen him, lying in bed, all the muscle gone, pale skin stretched over cheekbones, the eyes staring out at him, damning him. He had stayed half an hour, sitting next to his friend’s bed under fluorescent light, staring at the puke-green linoleum floor tiles, watching the occasional passing of an orderly under the drawn dividing curtain, the flowers he had bought from the corner vendor on the street outside the hospital hanging in his hands, wondering why he had even bothered coming. He had taken a last look, pushed himself to his feet, crammed the flowers into the bin by the door, and walked out. That was twelve years ago.

  Please, they wrote, could he send more money. They had moved Eben from the military hospital four years ago, horrified at the level of care, at the way everyone just wanted to forget. They found him a place in a private clinic they couldn’t afford. Twelve years now he’d been like that. It didn’t seem possible. Some days Clay wished they would just pull the plug. He had actually written them a letter a couple of months ago pleading with them to do just that, but had binned it. He should never have brought him out. He should have let him die there, staring up into the blue Ovamboland sky. If he had been stronger, a better friend, he would have.

&nbs
p; Clay pushed back his chair and picked up the phone. ‘Nils, it’s Clay Straker.’ He knew Karila would be there, even on a Friday. ‘I left that tender on your desk yesterday. Did you get a chance to look at it?’

  Clay looked down at his copy of the estimate. The margins were scribbled with red, numbers crossed out and recalculated two, three times. He had even lowered his rate slightly over the current phase.

  The line was open, static only.

  ‘Nils? Are you there?’

  ‘That will not be acceptable, I am afraid,’ came the voice on the line. ‘We would like to extend your contract, Straker – the quality of your work has been good – but we have a lower bidder. I am sure you can understand our position.’

  ‘Look, I can come down to seventy-five thousand. I can’t go any lower, considering all that needs to be done.’

  ‘Is that the best price you can give us, Straker?’

  He was pretty sure that none of his competitors, the larger consulting firms, could go that low. He clenched his jaw. ‘Bargain of the year, Nils.’

  ‘And you guarantee we’ll get our approval from the agency?’

  ‘You’ll have your permit. Just like last time.’

  ‘Please send me a letter confirming your new offer, and we’ll get back to you with our decision.’

  ‘You’ll have it today,’ he said.

  ‘There is one more thing, Straker,’ came Karila’s voice. ‘There has been another attack. Two gathering stations were hit last night, generators destroyed, production off-line for twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Jesus. Was anyone hurt?’

  ‘Only a couple of Yemeni labourers. Cuts and bruises. They are in hospital now. It could have been much worse.’

  ‘You really think this guy is Al Qaeda?’

  ‘It is not my concern, Mister Straker. Vance Parnell is dealing with the government on this matter. Speaking of which, the PSO called this morning.’

  Clay waited, let the line burn.

  ‘They are expecting you this afternoon. They want to “confirm some details”, as they put it.’